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by Lokubanda Tillakaratne, University of California, Los Angeles

By the side of rutted foot path where the blackened trail of blood starts, a camouflaged 2' x 1" galvanized pipe is tied to a tree fork approximately 18 inches from the ground. It aims across the path.

A gray twine stretching from gulla, the trigger mechanism near the truss is pulled tightly across the path and tied about 10 inches from the floor to another tree. A bunch of dehydrated Talaa kola, an aromatic herb (villagers chew as an alternative to betel vine leaves) remain scattered soaked in patches of blood.

About 100 feet further up the path the blood trail stops. There, under the August sun, the 6'4" frame of Karadikkulame Muthubanda, a father of four, lies across the path stiffened and soaked in his own blood. He is dead. Just 48 hours ago while returning after plucking some Talaa kola he tripped on the trigger line of a trap gun, just a half mile from his chena. He bled to death when the shrapnel blew off his knee. Due to the remote location, villagers couldn't find him in time to get medical attention.

As the latest quandary to overwhelm the far away villages in Sri Lanka, trap guns (also called regionally as kadan tuwakku, bata tuwakku, ath tuwakku and ugul tuwakku) like the one responsible for Muthubanda's death are becoming a nasty force to reckon with. Just as it is, a certainty that a community has someone employed in the apparel industry, someone hurt from the war; it is not uncommon now, to find in a village in the Dry Zone someone who is a casualty from a trap gun.

Trap guns' victims are multi-faceted. In a recent newspaper story we read about the injuries sustained by a black bear from a trap gun set up near Thanthirimale. Furthermore, stories of sightings of elephants with injuries are rampant, but they do not necessarily give us the complete picture as to what caused these injuries.

Evidence of blood-smeared spoor leading up to discharged trap guns and the fact that most injuries concentrate on the lower parts of limbs of elephants indicate that a good share of their injuries is from trap guns along foot paths in the highlands around villages set up by villagers to protect their crops and to kill game.

The Wild Life authorities reported that in 2001 alone close to 200 elephants lost their lives as a result of injuries from trap guns. This in itself is a stunning number. It is not surprising that every herd of cattle in a village has at least a few cows with badly deformed or amputated limbs resulting from trap gun injuries. We will never know how many villagers, livestock or elephants have to perish before we can realize the full magnitude of this issue.

Evidence is emerging indicating that trap guns may be deliberately directed against not just animals but fellow villagers. In August 2002, at Udamaluwa near Sigiriya crime investigators recovered a trap gun as the murder weapon in a land dispute case. As the manufacturing processes of most trap guns do not follow any conventional methods and uniform choice of materials, murder by trap gun will raise eyebrows in the law enforcement community, for the challenges it may pose to the forensic science of crimes involving these devices. Existing laws are meaningless to a trap gun maker safely deep inside the jungle where he is the boss among his powerless company - the unsuspecting wild life.

The Geneva-based Small Arms Survey estimates that there are well over 45,000 registered guns and 20,000 illegal guns in Sri Lanka. Most of these are in the urban areas where only 16 per cent of the total population lives. There are ways to track these guns and introduce measures to control their detrimental impact. However, a cocked and hidden galvanized pipe ready to go off on a serene jungle foot path has no known remedy.

Muthubanda's death, the Udamaluwa murder, and other unreported cases of trap gun injuries bear witness to the newest public health threat these devices are capable of. With due respect to victims of land mines and efforts being made to get rid of them, trap gun's threat to the health of villagers is also very real and needs attention.

Until about the later part of the 20th century, the trap gun was not a device commonly used as today. For its potential for colateral damage some villagers regarded the setting up of a trap gun to hunt game as a cowardly thing. Even if one ever tried to set up a similar device, it could have been as a toy, or tried out as a curiosity or out of desperation.

Closest they came to making a trap gun was the age-old practice of blasting employed in quarries. The only explosive device used by ordinary villagers to hunt game then was the shotgun and Beheth Tuwakkuwa or Kalampadiya - the famed Muzzle-loading gun. I was privileged once to hold my grandfather's muzzle loading gun.

Villagers also used another non-destructive explosive gadget called Beerangaya (Peerange) - the thumb-sized 3-inch tall iron receptacle attached to the end of a hand-held stick. A quantity of sulfur and gunpowder was placed in the receptacle and capped with a metal dowel that was snared to the stick. When the dowel cap was struck with a wood hammer, the powder in the receptacle exploded making a big bang.

This was used to scare off wild animals such as herds of elephants, annoying monkeys hanging about near crops and as an alternative to crackers during funeral processions, Bana Pinkams and various celebratory occasions.

According to the villagers, a turning point occurred when the 1971 insurrection changed the ease at which they could carry and own guns. It also increased the perceived mistrust and skepticism the authorities bestowed up on the villagers for gun ownership. Subsequent uprisings didn't help the villagers' cause either.

The government's haste and manner in which all guns were collected did major disservice to villagers whose only means of protection from wildlife was the few guns they had in a community. After events subsided, to the dismay of villagers they found that reclaiming the guns was not as easy as it was supposed to be.

Most guns couldn't be found due to poor inventory management in the government armories or falling into the hands of unauthorized individuals who had easy access to them. Among the guns that were returned some had their parts removed rendering them useless. Frequent communal riots and ethnic conflicts exasperated the issue tightening gun regulations depriving farmers of ownership and badly needed protection of the paddy and chena cultivations.

Conversely, more and more forest cover disappeared due to well documented reasons. When communities expanded to the borders of existing parcels of forest it resulted in wildlife coming into close contact with people more frequently. Villagers left with no other option, took alternate methods to get their meat and protect crops. They stopped thinking like their predecessors during the days of muzzle-loading guns. Now, it is not a cowardly act to set up a trap gun. It is a necessity.

Trap gun is not an industry. It is a secret way of life.

Trap gun owners are anonymous shadows of folks you meet every day everywhere in all shapes and forms. Husband may not discuss anything about his trap gun even with his wife. A trap gun maker is a mystery. Sometimes, his existence borders a mythical state.

When a thunderous explosion echoes in the middle of the night in the highlands around a village, it signals us his existence just as a broken twig hanging at the entrance to a jungle footpath is our evidence of the existence of Ayyanayake Deyyo.

The trap gun maker's influence is so much that I am not surprised that over time his being could get elevated to the status of a Yaka like Kadawara, Nae yaka, Riri yaka. The day is not going to be too far off when villagers will begin hanging a twig at the entrance to a foot path in the name of a Kadan tuwakku deyyo or Kadan Yaka!

The trap gun is made with very little difficulty. Due to ethical and security reasons, I shall refrain from describing how this is done. But suffice to say that villagers find raw materials for a trap gun from items they buy in the grocery store or stationery store. It is an irony that a few days later, when Karadikkulame Muthubanda's body was being taken for burial same items were bought from the store to celebrate the somber moment in the procession.

Villagers living near the conflict areas use Explosive Remnants of War (ERW) to manufacture the trap guns. After two decades of exposure and living among the ERW, they mastered the art of scraping explosives from the unused ordnance found near the villages. I wish I could have referenced to the saying that necessity as the father of invention in a different setting.

When in the late 1980s and '90s hardware stores opened up in the new cities built in irrigation development zones, access to raw materials for trap gun making became very easy. The iron pipes sold in hardware stores accelerated the inventive minds looking for an alternative for crop protection and find meat for consumption. Over time, at least a few trap guns would be made from every inventory of pipes laid out nicely on the lobby of your local hardware store.

While this phenomenon can be found in any forested region in Sri Lanka where small game is abundant and folks have the desire and means to manufacture a trap gun, I will only focus on so many little ways how this menace has entered into the life of people in Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, and Vanni districts.

Recently the shareholders of my Pahala Baage had to make a critical decision when they gathered to build the communal watch hut in the middle of their paddy field. In previous years, in order to tie the rafters to the roof, all they had to do was to send someone a few hundred yards into the jungle to haul in strands of kiri wel (a type of creepers growing on the floor of the forest).

This is a common creeper and easily available that in the days gone by, wattle structure of houses in the Gam Medda were tied with kiri wel before filling it with loafs of mud and daubed.

When decision time came they agreed that it was not worth to risk injury from a trap gun. Instead, they sent a biker to the hardware store to buy nails for the project. Soon, picket fences will be built around paddy plots with electric nail guns and not with kiri wel, as my ancestors used to do. When a villager builds the pela in his kurahan hena using a Black & Decker 18V nail gun, folks, we have gone way too far into the trap gun culture!

Trap guns have impacted the carefree life of kids in my village. One of their favorite hangouts - the Wood Apple (Divul) groves in the highlands bordering the village is nearly out of bounds for them. Possibility of trap guns in the vicinity is one more thing they have to worry about now. Back of their mind is the warning the parents preach everyday: the colourless string pulled across the foot path, the hidden killer waiting to set off a deadly trap.

For them, collecting Palu, Weera and Damba fruit has changed forever. Sneaking into the jungle while returning home from school and spending time watching bird nests are gone. Kids and even adults are becoming prisoners in their own villages unable to walk in to the forest freely as they used to.

Even though a fictional story set in mid-1980s, Sidney Marcus Dias's "Suwanda Yahaluwo" (Fragrence of Friends, Thothenna, 2002) records the heart-wrenching account of how two school friends in Eluwankulama in Puttalama were traumatized by a trap gun set up by an acquaintance in the highlands in the vicinity of the village. His powerful rendition gives an insight to the inconceivable reality when such calamity takes place in a village in Sri Lanka.

Trap guns have used the back door to enter into our culture and inched all the way to the front door. It seems like no one cares to take notice. However, villagers believe that we have passed the threshold of this phenomenon and we can't treat it with "it is the other guy's problem" attitude anymore. There are emerging signs that this is not a problem of victims like the orphaned family of Muthubanda alone.

Here is a little anecdote to better illustrate the extent to which they have begun weighing on the affairs of Sri Lanka. Recently, the Grama Sevaka of Kandu Tulane in Kanadara Korale came riding on his dusty C50 along the Karadikkulama tank bund. He stopped at the mankada where more than a dozen people were taking the afternoon bath.

He called for their attention and made the following announcement: "Saaliyapura army camp has asked me to notify everyone in my jurisdiction to decommission all active trap guns one week from today! They shall remain deactivated for one week.

The reason for this request is that the army is bringing few units along this way on a jungle training exercise."

It is hard to believe but profoundly true that a 21st century army is taking trap guns into its training protocol. And these villagers, despite their remote placement, never cease to amaze me. They always have something up their sleeves for us to think about.

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