The next morning they divided into several parties, and went to another district to get food. It was a nut country. To their consternation very little food was to be got; for the ngoas had been there and eaten all the koola nuts that had fallen on the ground, and some of the men of the woods and monkeys had made great havoc among the fruits and nuts. The dwarfs had no words bad enough for them, and wished they were all dead.
That afternoon some of their fellows arrived with a dead nkengo which they carried on a long pole. There was very great excitement among all the dwarfs when they saw the dead nkengo, for they thought that they were distantly related to him. They surrounded the body as he lay on the ground. The nkengo had died of old age; he had only five teeth left, and the hair on his body had become gray and was very thin. How old he was nobody could guess.
That evening, the dwarfs said: “Let us move away to-morrow. We have to travel too far now to get food. It will take us the whole day to go from here and come back. How horrid the ngoas are; but still worse are the men of the woods! What a pity that we cannot trap them all!”
Early the next morning the dwarfs packed their small belongings, the men having their bows and arrows, the women carrying their little bits of children slung on their backs.
As they were ready to start, the old chief said: “The men of the woods, the nkengos, and the mbouvés have an advantage over us. They have no belongings to carry with them when they go to find new quarters.” And, before leaving, the dwarfs said: “We cannot all go together, for we should not be able to pick up food enough for all of us. So we must journey in small squads, and before night we will meet by the big koola-tree we all know. Its nuts are ripe, and we shall find plenty of them on the ground, and have a good supper, unless the ngoas have been there before us.”
With this understanding they started. They looked, as their bodies were dimly seen through the branches of the trees, as if they were men of the woods. Soon the squads were out of sight of one another.
Though the dwarfs can find their way through the jungle better than the big people, they have not the natural gift in this respect bestowed on the animals of the forest. When they are changing their abode and are on the march, they have to make marks now and then, and see that they follow the marks they made with their hatchets the year before upon the trees, and also make new ones as they go along. They feed on what they can find on the way, picking here and there a berry, fruit, or nut, and looking for monkeys, which they hope to kill with their arrows made of palm-tree branches.
At the appointed time, the different squads of dwarfs arrived, one after another, under the koola-tree, and a great abundance of koola nuts covered the ground,—a sight which rejoiced them greatly.
“Fortunate are we,” said Monbon, one of the dwarfs, with a shrill laugh, “that these horrid ngoas did not make their appearance before us; otherwise we should have had to go to sleep with shrunken stomachs, for very little food have we found on our way.”
They lighted two big fires, and then gathered the koola nuts. These they broke with stones, and ate a good many of them and saved the others. When they had eaten, some of the dwarfs went to a stream near by to drink. There they saw the footprints of a ngina, and they were full of fear.