THE CAT AND THE RAT
On the fourth night of the Alo Man’s stay, Nkunda was looking for her cat. She had been feeling a little jealous that day, because Mpoko and every one else gave so much attention to the dogs. It seemed as if the cat too might be jealous, or perhaps the dogs were so proud of themselves that they wanted the village to themselves, for Nkunda had not seen her pet since the night before.
Even the baby, rolling about in the doorway, had missed his playmate, and he repeated Nkunda’s call, which sounded very like cat language. In the Ki-sukama dialect of the Bantu language the cat is called Ca-ungu, in the Ki-fipa dialect, Inyao, and in Isi-nyixa talk it is Unyawu; but all these names sound like the little “miaou” that the cat makes when she has something to show you, and this was the sound that came out of the darkness in answer to Nkunda’s call.
The sound came from the direction of the granary. This was a building planned very carefully for its special purpose. It was a large round basket-work structure, plastered with mud and built on a floor raised above the ground on short legs of forked branches. This floor or platform was made in such a way as to keep out rats. Nevertheless, now and then one would make an entrance, and as Nkunda came up to the platform the cat leaped down, carrying in her mouth a large rat. It was as if she wished to prove that she could take care of herself, whether any one else remembered her or not.
Nkunda called her mother and showed her what the cat had brought, and a little crowd gathered about the granary. Purring proudly, the cat led the way to a hole where the wall had crumbled from dampness or had been gnawed away, and it was quite large enough for a rat to get in. If the cat had not been so prompt in disposing of the thief, he and his family might have gone to housekeeping in there; but as it was, little harm had been done.
“The hole must be stopped up,” said Nkunda’s mother. “The rain might get in and all the grain would mold, through a hole like that.”
“And we must have a rat hunt,” said Mpoko, coming up with his special friend Nkula to look at the hole. “But we must make some new traps and get our bows and arrows in order first. There will be no rats about when we have finished with them!”
“That is all very well,” said Nkunda, stroking her cat; “but your trap did not catch this rat and my cat did.”
The rat hunt took place, however. 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 ground and begin to walk toward the center, kicking up the grass as they go, and shouting. The rats scamper toward the center, where they are likely to run into the traps; but they have a habit of starting to run and then stopping for a moment to look about, and this gives the boys a chance to shoot them down with their small, sharp arrows. Between the traps and the shooting a considerable number of rats rewarded the hunters, and meanwhile the hole in the granary was well patched up with wattle and mud.