All day long the Cat watched beside the hole.
When night came, the Rat had dug down under a tree root and had come up on the other side of the tree, and he crept out of the other end of his tunnel and went on to the village, while the Cat still watched at her end.
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.
CHAPTER V
THE JACKAL AND HIS TRACKS
There seemed to be no animal in the forest or the swamp or on the plain about which the Alo Man did not know a story. In the nine hundred thousand miles of country, more or less, through which the Congo and its branches flow, there is land suitable for almost every kind of wild creature known to Africa. Elephants, buffalo, wild cattle, rhinoceros, antelope, koodoo, eland, giraffes, pigs, and other grazing and browsing animals wander over the grassy table-lands. Hippopotami, crocodiles, and other water creatures live in the rivers and swamps, and among the beasts of prey are lions, leopards, hyenas, and jackals, although the jackal is not much to be feared. Monkeys large and small are numerous in the forests, and in a part of the forest so old and deep that the people call it the Plantations of God, the gorilla is sometimes found. In the Alo Man’s stories, however, the smaller animals almost always had the best of it. They also had much more to say for themselves at night. As the old people put it, it is not always the biggest man whose words come in crowds.
“Do you know the reason why the hyena’s legs are not alike?” asked the Alo Man one night after supper, when there was a great to-do out in the darkness.
No one did, and of course every one wanted to hear the story of the Hyena and the Jackal.