This leopard-charmer started quite alone, and I thought no more about him during the day.
In the evening I was seated on one of those little round Apingi stools, and Remandji and I were talking about the back country. I felt very much interested in the account he gave me of it, as he spoke of a tribe of people I had never seen, when lo! what did I see? Okabi, carrying on his back a dead leopard! I rubbed my eyes, thinking it was a mistake. No; it was Okabi himself, and a dead leopard.
How Okabi got the leopard I could not imagine, but surely he had it, and there was no mistake about it. He placed the leopard at my feet, saying, "Did I not tell you I had a fetich to kill leopards?" Remandji also said, "Did I not tell you I had a man who had a big fetich to kill leopards?"
OKABI AND THE LEOPARD.
"I believe," said I to Remandji, "that when he promised to kill a leopard for me he had a trap set, and he knew that a leopard was in it. For," said I, "no man can make leopards come to him." "Oh yes," said Remandji, "there are men who have fetiches which have power to make game come to them."
I coaxed Okabi to show me his leopard fetich. He promised to do so the next day. He came, but I have very little doubt that he took something off from it he did not want me to see.
He entered my hut and then untied the skin, and after he spread it out I saw the contents which made the fetich. There were ashes of different plants, little pieces of wood, the small head of a young squirrel, claws of the wonderful guanionien, feathers of birds, bones of animals I could not recognize, bones of birds, dried intestines of animals, some dried brain of young chimpanzee, a very rare land-shell, scales of fishes, a little bit of scrapings from the skull of one of his ancestors. These were the things that made the leopards come to him.
"And if one of all these things you see," said he to me, "were missing, the fetich or monda would be good for nothing."
Time passed pleasantly in that fine country, and one day, as I was quietly reading my Bible outside of my hut, a crowd assembled and watched me with wondering eyes. I told them that when I read this book it taught me that God was the Great Spirit who had made the stars, the moon, the rivers, the mountains, and all the wild beasts, and every thing that was in the world.