The Alo Man

by Mara L. Pratt-Chadwick; Louise Lamprey

There was no need to paddle; the men had all they could do to steer the canoes as they rode on the strong current. At last they shot round a bend of the river and into the shadow of the bridge and scrambled ashore.

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.

Over narrow streams, bridges are sometimes made of a bundle of slim tree trunks lashed together and resting on the banks, but here the river was too wide for that. Farther down, the banks of the Lower Congo are steep hills, a mile and a quarter apart, and through this funnel-like channel the Upper Congo and its tributary streams pour their waters into a tremendous whirlpool known as the Devil’s Cook Pot. None of the men of the village had ever seen this awful place, but they had heard of it, and many were the tales told of the dangers of the unknown waters toward which their river flowed through the wilderness.

While the men worked at the lashings of the timbers and the closer knotting of the ropes, the boys went about their fishing. They did not have much trouble in finding a suitable shallow place for their little wicker fences, but when they came to fish with the scoop net, Mpoko discovered that he had not reckoned on the strength of the stream. His best net was whirled away out of his hand before he had used it twice. Thereafter the boys had to take turns, one using the remaining large net while the other fished in the shallows.

Their misfortunes did not end there. They had just gathered all their little fishes into a woven basket, when Nkula darted back from the river with a startled shout, and Mpoko turned just in time to see net, fish, and all vanish into the long, wicked jaws of a crocodile.

The boys were in luck, as one of the men told them, not to have gone into the crocodile’s stomach themselves. All the same, they felt very cheap to be going home with only a few mean little fish for the whole day’s work.

The bridge had now been put in order, and as the party took boat again for home, several crocodile stories were told. Every one of the men had had some experience with the Terror of the Waters. They all knew how he would lie for hours in the mud with only his nose in sight, looking exactly like a fallen log, and how his hoarse call could sometimes be heard in the swamp through the whole night. The boys felt secretly glad to be on the way home in a solid, well-balanced log canoe.

It was slower work returning than it had been coming down the river, and the paddles worked steadily. When they had traveled some distance, a hunter from another village hailed them from the trail. He had a wild pig that he did not wish to carry home and after a little bargaining the bridge menders paid for it and it was tumbled into the canoe. 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!