In the afternoon, when, having found a few berries, he had eaten the only meal of the day and was about to seek, earlier than usual, his quarters for the night, he heard, from a short distance to the left of his track, a great noise of growling and snarling. The sounds were not like those of any animals he knew. With cautious steps he made his way through the matted undergrowth towards the noise. Almost unawares he came upon an extraordinary sight. In the centre of an open space, scarcely twenty feet across, a small man, lighter in hue than the majority of Congolese natives, was struggling to free himself from the grip of a serval which had buried its claws deep in his body and thigh. Two other small men, less even than Samba in height, were leaping and yelling around their comrade, apparently instructing him how to act, though neither made use of the light spears they carried to attack the furious beast. The serval, its greenish eyes brilliant with rage, was an unusually powerful specimen of its kind, resembling indeed a leopard rather than a tiger-cat. It was bent, as it seemed, upon working its way upward to the man's throat, and its reddish spotted coat was so like his skin in hue that, as they writhed and twisted this way and that, an onlooker might well have hesitated to launch a spear at the beast for fear of hitting the man.
One of the little man's hands had a grip of the serval's throat; but he was not strong enough to strangle it, and the lightning quickness of the animal's movements prevented him from gripping it with the other hand. Even a sturdily-built European might well have failed to gain the mastery in a fight with such a foe, and the little man had neither the strength nor the staying power to hold out much longer. Yet his companions continued to yell and dance round, keeping well out of reach of the terrible claws; while blood was streaming from a dozen deep gashes in the little man's body.
Samba stood but a few moments gazing at the scene. The instinct of the born hunter was awake in him, and that higher instinct which moves a man to help his kind. Clutching his broad knife he bounded into the open, reached the fainting man in two leaps, and plunged the blade deep into the creature's side behind the shoulder. With a convulsive wriggle the serval made a last attempt to bury its fangs in its victim's neck. Then its muscles suddenly relaxed, and it fell dead to the ground.
Samba's intervention had come too late. The man had been so terribly mauled that his life was ebbing fast. His comrades looked at him and began to make strange little moaning cries; then they laid him on a bed of leaves and turned their attention to Samba. He knew that he was in the presence of Bambute, the dreaded pigmies of the forest. Never before had he seen them; but he had heard of them as fearless hunters and daring fighters, who moved about from place to place in the forest, and levied toll upon the plantations of larger men. The two little men came to him and patted his arms and jabbered together; but he understood nothing of what they said. By signs he explained to them that he was hungry. Then, leaving their wounded comrade to his fate, they took Samba by the hands and led him rapidly into the forest, following a path which could scarcely have been detected by any except themselves. In some twenty minutes they arrived at a clearing where stood a group of two score small huts, like beehives, no more than four feet high, with an opening eighteen inches square, just large enough to allow a pigmy to creep through. Pigmies, men and women, were squatting around—ugly little people, but well-made and muscular, with leaves and grass aprons for all clothing, and devoid of such ornaments as an ordinary negro loves.
They sprang up as Samba approached between his guides, and a great babel of question and answer arose, like the chattering of monkeys. The story was told; none showed any concern for the man left to die; the Bambute acknowledge no ties, and seem to have little family affection. A plentiful dinner of antelope flesh and bananas was soon placed before Samba, and it was clear that the pigmies were ready to make much of the stranger who had so boldly attacked the serval.
One of them knew a little of a Congolese dialect, and he succeeded in making Samba understand that the chief was pleased with him, and wished to adopt him as his son. Samba shook his head and smiled: his own parents were alive, he said; he wished for no others. This made the chief angry. The chiefs of some of the big men had often adopted pigmy boys and made slaves of them; it was now his turn. The whole community scowled and snarled so fiercely that Samba thought the safest course was to feign acquiescence for the moment, and seize the first opportunity afterwards of slipping away.
But nearly three weeks passed before a chance presented itself. The pigmies kept him with them, never letting him go out of their sight. They fed him well—almost too well, expecting his powers of consumption to be equal to their own. Never before had he seen such extraordinary eaters. One little man would squat before a stalk bearing fifty or sixty bananas, and eat them all. True, he lay moaning and groaning all night, but next morning would be quite ready to gorge an equal meal. Since they did not cultivate the ground themselves, Samba wondered where they obtained their plentiful supply of bananas and manioc. He learnt by and by that they appropriated what they pleased from the plantations of a neighbouring tribe of big men, who had too great a respect for the pigmies' poisoned arrows and spears to protest. Samba hoped that he might one day escape to this tribe, but a shifting of the village rendered this impossible, though it afforded the boy the opportunity for which he had so long been waiting.
On the night when the pigmy tribe settled down in its new home, four days' journey from the old, Samba took advantage of the fatigue of his captors to steal away. He had chosen the darkest hour before the dawn, and knowing that he would very soon be missed and followed up, he struck off through the forest as rapidly as he could. With plentiful food he had recovered his old strength and vigour, and he strode along fleetly, finding his way chiefly by the nature of the ground beneath his feet; for there was no true path, and the forest was almost completely dark, even when dawn had broken elsewhere. As the morning drew on the leafy arcades became faintly illuminated, and he could then see sufficiently well to choose the easiest way through the obstacles that beset his course.
Despite all his exertions his progress was very slow. Well he knew that, expert though he was in forest travel, he could not move through these tangled mazes with anything like the speed of the active little men who by this time were almost certainly on his track. At the best he could hardly have got more than two miles' start. As he threaded his way through the brushwood, hacking with his knife at obstructive creepers, and receiving many a scratch from briar and thorn, he tried to think of some way of throwing the pursuers off the scent; but every yard of progress demanded so much exertion that he was unequal to the effort of devising any likely ruse.
Suddenly coming upon a shallow stream about two yards wide that ran across his line of march, he saw in a flash a chance of covering his trail. He stepped into the stream, pausing for a moment to drink, then waded a few paces against the current, narrowly scanning the bordering trees. They showed a close network of interlacing branches, one tree encroaching on another. Choosing a bough overhanging the brook, just above his head, Samba drew himself up into the tree, taking care that no spots of water were left on the branch to betray him. Then, clambering nimbly like a monkey from bough to bough, he made a path for himself through the trees at an angle half-way between the directions of the stream and of his march through the forest. He hoped that, losing his track in the stream, the Bambute would jump to the conclusion that he was making his way up or down its bed, and would continue their chase accordingly.