Louise Lamprey

“ After a while the Leopard came back, dragging a fine Antelope.
“This is for my supper and the cubs’ supper,” she said, “and tomorrow you shall have the bones for your dinner.”
The Dog thought of the good dinner he would have off those large bones, and he wagged his tail and grinned.
“But remember this,” went on the Leopard, “you must never take bones outside the cave. We never eat outside our caves, but always inside. If people change their customs, there is no telling what will happen.” ”

“ Everybody was so cross in these days that there was no comfort in living. Even the mother of Mpoko and Nkunda, who was usually very gentle and kind, had said sharp words now and then. In some of the other families the mothers whipped the children all round with no excuse whatever.
When the trader and his men had gone to the Nkenge market, two days’ journey away, every one was glad to hear the drum sound after supper for a dance and some story-telling. Mpoko climbed up in the big tree under which the chief held his councils and gave his judgments, to get a better view of the dancing. ”

“ The Leopard looked at the sharp spears of the Chief and his followers, and went growling away to her cave in the forest. Ever since that time the Dog loves man better than he does any of the animals of the forest, and serves him against all his enemies; and if the Leopard comes to steal from the village, the Dog will call for the man to drive him away. ”

“ The forest was a wonderful place even to them, who had never known any other country, and to a civilized boy it would have looked like fairyland. Monkeys leaped and chattered in the branches, and birds of many sorts, many of them splendid in coloring, hopped and flew among the trees. ”

“ Then through the blackness of the forest, far away, there sounded singing, and Mpoko and Nkunda were not afraid any more. This was not one of Tswki’s war parties that was coming; it was their own men, singing all together to forget their weariness on the last miles of the trail. A Central African carrier will travel with a load of sixty pounds from fifteen to thirty miles a day. And this is not walking on a level road; the carriers go through a wilderness without anything like a road, the trail often only a few inches wide. ”

“ A man might gather a quantity of some produce like tobacco, rubber, raffia, palm oil, or grain, at one market and another, and take it finally to the great market to exchange for beads, brass, calico, or whatever else he found there. Salt is so rare in some parts of Africa that it is used for money, and a man will work as a porter so many days for so many bags of salt. When the people make salt on the shores of an inland lake, they have to gather the salty sand and wash it out in pots specially made, with little holes in the bottom into which the salt water runs ”

“ So the shell of the Tortoise was covered with a thick coat of sticky wax, and he took his place beside the pool to watch for trespassers. He drew his head and his tail and his feet inside his shell, so that he looked like a flat brown stone. From time to time he would stick his head out cautiously to see if any one was coming. After waiting all night long, he heard a noise in the bushes. ”

“ CHAPTER XI THE HYRAX AND THE ELEPHANT The returning caravan brought new people to the village. It had met an Arab trader coming up the river with his porters and some armed men for a bodyguard. The Arab could speak a little Bantu, and the language he talked to his men was a dialect called Swahili, which is something like Bantu and is spoken by most of the traders. When he saw the villagers’ rubber and palm oil and heard about their country, he seemed much interested, and wished to try their markets. ”

“ The village was fairly clean, for the dogs, fowls, and goats and the wild birds and animals ate up a great deal of garbage. If rubbish accumulated, it was carried off into the forest at certain times. There was always enough to eat of one kind of food or another, and enough to trade, for most of the things really needed could always be found in the great storehouse of the wilderness. If there had never been anything to be afraid of, the people would have lived comfortably year in and year out. ”

“ The hunters of the village had no mind to lose this chance. Waiting only to provide themselves with food, they set off on the trail, and managed during the next day to head the elephants round toward a pit they knew of which made a most effective elephant trap. Here they caught two large elephants with splendid tusks, and they came home in triumph with news of meat enough to provide a feast for the whole village, and a store of ivory for the king which was worth many brass rods. ”

“ Mpoko kept stiller than ever as he listened. He did not know what would happen to him if he should be found there.
The chief and his old men were worried over the trader’s doings. In some of his glass bottles he had strong drink which took away a man’s sense and made him quarrelsome and silly. “Drink beer, think beer,” the Bantu proverb says; but this was something much worse than any of the mild drinks made by the natives. Even a little of it would lead a man to make the most foolish bargains and tell whatever he knew. The trader was spoiling the country, they said. ”

“ Mpoko had been promised that he should go fishing when the canoes went downstream [Pg 12] to mend a bridge that was shaky, and Nkunda promised to help him make new nets for the fishing. He finished winding the wire round the spear handle and began to polish it with great care.
Then very far away in the forest they heard the tapping of a drum.
The sound of a drum in the African jungle always means something. It may mean a village dance; it may mean news; it may mean sudden danger. It is not like any other noise in the forest. ”

“ Then while the neighbors went to fetch their whips, the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman climbed up and got the bag of cowries, which they had hidden in the thatch of the roof, and ran with it into the forest. But they were not quite quick enough. The neighbors saw them and came after them so fast with their whips of hippopotamus hide, that at last the scrawny old man and the scrawny old woman had to climb into a tree. ”

“ The people of the village knew a great deal about this river, but they could not have found it on a map, for they had never seen such a thing. White men call it the Congo. This was the name of a chief who ruled the country near the mouth of the river more than five hundred years ago, before even the first Portuguese explorers came. It was the Portuguese who gave his name to the river. But the Congo has many names in the twenty-five hundred miles of its length. Here in the jungle it has a very long name which means The-great-river-out-of-the-lake-that-drowns-the-locust-who-tries-to-fly-across. ”

“ Where such a trail crosses a river too deep to ford,—and in flood time African rivers are likely to be deep,—of course there must be a bridge. The wild people are clever at making woven bridges. To be sure, these bridges are not wide enough for horses or wagons, but there are no horses or wagons to go over them, so that makes no difference. Travelers pay something for the privilege of using such a bridge, while the men of the country near by keep it in order. It was to repair a bridge that the men of Mpoko’s village were going downstream now. ”

“ When the king dies, all this collection of carved ivory is destroyed; for this reason carved ivory that a trader can buy is rare in Equatorial Africa. Much uncarved ivory is also hoarded.
The people of Mpoko’s village traded rubber, palm oil, and sometimes raffia. They were now getting ready for a great journey to the trading station far down the river. All the river villages would share in this expedition, and there would be perhaps one hundred and fifty men in all. One chief might go himself, with as many men as were needed to carry his goods ”

“ In a great part of wild Africa, slave-raiding has always gone on more or less, and the forest paths are never really safe. Mpoko and Nkunda had heard their mother tell of a little sister of her [Pg 85] own who was sent to the market four miles away to buy a saucepan, and on the way home, straying from the party with whom she went, had been lost and never again heard of. There were people they knew who had been slaves themselves, or had lost a mother, father, or friend in this way. ”

“ CHAPTER VII THE TRAIL OF THE ELEPHANT The farms around the village were good to have, but the real storehouse of the people was the forest. The forests of the Congo form one of the largest tree-clad regions of the world. More rubber vines are found there than in any other place.
Yams, plantains, and pineapples grow wild in the forest. Coffee now grows wild in many parts of Africa, although it was not till 1876 that Scotch planters brought the first coffee tree to Africa, from the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens. Cotton grows without being cultivated and is sometimes woven on native looms ”

“ The queerest-looking bird of all, perhaps, was the ground hornbill, which is as common about African villages as a crow. This bird looks as if it had been trying to imitate the rhinoceros, for it has a great horny bill with a thick lump on what might be called the bridge of the nose. It is useful to the villager, for it is a sort of street cleaner in feathers, and eats garbage, rats, snakes, lizards, and other small creatures, with great relish. ”

“ He spoke to one and another, asking for food and oil and offering to pay, but although they gave him all that he needed and took his beads in payment, not one of them said a word in reply.
It was so queer in that place that the Rabbit began to be frightened, and at last he left the market place and went on, looking back over his shoulder until he was out of sight. When he came to a house he found an old man, and he asked the old man what was the matter with the people of that market, who went and came and bought and sold, and never said a word. ”

“ The boys had two new scoop nets, which Nkunda had helped to make. Like all the children of the village, they could do all sorts of things with fiber string, and could even make the string. Hibiscus fiber, braided palm leaves, thongs, and bark, all were used for string, thread, or cord as each happened to be wanted. Strands of fiber were made into string by rolling with the hand, on the thigh. Mpoko and Nkunda and Nkula, and even their younger playmates, could make any number of cat’s cradles. One looked like a locust, another like a grass hut with four sides and a pointed top ”

“ Games such as these not only teach the players to move promptly, see correctly and remember what they see, but give them practice in judging by the expression of a person’s face what he is about to do or what he is thinking. When a boy trained in games of the wits, like these, grows up and becomes a chief or a trader, it is very hard for any one to deceive him, or to read his face when he does not wish his thoughts to be known. ”

“ One reason why so much of Africa is still wild country, some of it not even explored, is that there are so many falls in the rivers. Boats cannot go up from the sea to the interior unless they are light enough to be carried round the falls. And boats that are small enough for this are too small to be of much use in carrying goods for trading or large parties of settlers. Another reason is that so much of the country is either dense jungle or waterless plain. Almost the only way to carry goods into the Upper Congo country is by porters, who have to follow narrow trails, in single file. ”

“ Mpoko’s mother could always depend on pigs being on sale at the Nkenge market, and whoever had a pig to sell would be likely [Pg 18] to take it there. At the Konzo market, four miles away, were good pots, calabashes, and saucepans, some of which were made by women in their village, for one of the old grandmothers was rather famous for her pottery. Other markets were known for palm wine, iron work, oil, or some other specialty, and besides these things cassava roots, peanuts, kwanga (native bread) , palm oil, beans and other vegetables, grains and fowls were generally sold in all markets. ”

“ The trail made a turn toward the right, about halfway to the top, and here the elephant pit had been formed by the washing out of a deep hole in the rainy season. It was covered over with woven grass and boughs, and it looked as if the long grass had blown over the trail just there. Mpoko scampered across and ducked behind a boulder beyond. Out from the woods came streaming a company of tribesmen, shouting and waving their spears. The Arab looked at the pile of rocks above, and saw that behind those rocks he and his men could defy any number of enemies with spears. ”

“ The old hunters who were looking on very much approved of this game, which they had played when they were boys, and their fathers and grandfathers before them. A good player must have a quick eye and a good memory, both of which are most needful in hunting. As the Bantu proverb has it, “For a running antelope one needs a running shot.”
The next game, Mbele, or the Knife, trained not only the eye but the limbs, and was sometimes played by boys and girls alike. All the players stood in line, Satu at the head and Mpoko next him. ”

“ Toward evening or in the early morning the sap is collected and put into iron pots. It is a rather thick, milky juice, and the rubber is separated from the watery fluid either by boiling or by adding lime juice or tannin squeezed from wild fruits. Then it is dried, in the form of strips, or strips rolled into a ball, or flat cakes, over the smoke of a wood fire. Sometimes it is soaked [Pg 127] in streams to clear out the impurities, a practice which adds to its weight but is not honest. One man can collect three or four pounds a day, for which the trader will pay a shilling a pound. ”

“ As one of the men said slyly, roast pork for supper would do very well, seeing that the boys had not caught enough fish to make a showing!
At home, in the village, the women had come in and were at work as usual preparing supper. A little before sunset, far down the river, the voices of men singing came over the water, and as the song grew louder they could make out something about roast pig for supper.
“They must have killed something,” said Nkunda. ”

“ The bridge was made of saplings firmly lashed together and had a handrail of rattan. It hung from the great trees on the two sides of the river, high above even the reach of a flood. A log bridge might have been swept away by the caving of the banks in flood time, and the people could not possibly have built a stone bridge or an iron one.
When the traders were coming back from their last journey, they had noticed that the supports of the bridge were rather shaky, and as they meant to send a much larger caravan over it before long, they wanted to make sure that all was in order. ”

“ Moreover, a whole family did not live in a single house. Each grown person had a separate hut, the children usually staying with their mothers.
There was almost no furniture except that some houses had a mud platform with a grass bed on it. When the headman of the village presided on any formal occasion, he sat on a low stool cut out of a solid block of wood. The rest of the people sat on their heels and were perfectly comfortable, for they had always sat in that position. Food was served in wooden platters and calabashes, without tables. ”

“ From that day to this the Cat is never so fast asleep that she does not hear the gnawing of a Rat, and she is never tired of watching for the Rat to come out of a hole. And from that day to this the Rat knows that if there is a Cat in the village where he goes to steal grain, he will find the Cat waiting for him at one end or the other of his hole in the ground. ”

“ All the boys in the village came to it, and it was a most exciting time. The farm rat of Equatorial Africa is a rather pretty little brown animal with black stripes, and the boys do their hunting with traps and their small bows and arrows. The traps are made of basket-work and are cone-shaped. They are set in a group in the middle of a large grassy space where there is reason to suppose the rats are, and then the boys take their stand in a circle round the edge of this [Pg 45] ground and begin to walk toward the center, kicking up the grass as they go, and shouting. ”

“ The most profitable thing found in the great forest storehouse was rubber. Mpoko himself had helped get some of the supply of it that was waiting to go down to the coast. This work of getting rubber is done usually in August, or from October to March during the dry season, when there is not so much to do on the farms and [Pg 126] it is pleasanter to work in the woods. The women prepare about three weeks’ food for the rubber gatherers, who camp in the woods while the work goes on. ”

“ When the little Rabbits heard why they had no supper that night, they had a great deal to say about the Crocodile.
“That is all very well,” said the Rabbit, “but when a chicken is the judge, the cockroach gets no justice. We cannot depend on any one else to punish the Crocodile; we must do it ourselves. Come all of you and get dry grass and leaves, and we will go and lay them in a circle around the Crocodile while he is asleep, and then we will set them on fire. ”

“ The youngest sister took a strip of her garment and bound up the old woman’s wounds and fed and comforted her as if she had been the old woman’s own daughter. Scarcely had she done this when the old woman caught her by the arm. “My child,” she said, “you have come to a place where a terrible giant lives. ”

“ The Alo Man was talking to this chief and trying to make him agree to something.
“Hear now this plan,” said the Alo Man, persuasively. “It is true that these men have planned to come into your country and make war, and steal your ivory, and you have seen for yourself that they came with weapons in their hands and sent no messenger to tell you of their coming and ask permission to enter your village. You know also that they are taking slaves wherever they can, against the new law. If you kill them, as they deserve, they will do no more harm, it is true [the Arab’s teeth began to chatter] ”

“ Kwanga is sold in markets at the rate of a shilling for fifty pounds, and four pounds will last a man a day. When the men of the village went on a trading journey, or into the forest to gather palm nuts or to cut wood, they always took with them a supply of kwanga. The women had been busy making some that very day, for there was to be an expedition down the river which would start the following morning. This was why the rat, in his corner of the granary, had been left to nibble and to gnaw undisturbed.
While the cat enjoyed her well-earned supper, Nkunda sidled up to the Alo Man. ”