Samba Meets the Little Men
Samba had cheerfully accompanied Mr. Martindale's expedition, in the
confidence that one of its principal objects, if not indeed its main
one, was the discovery of his parents. Nando had told him, on the
ruins of Banonga, that the white man would help him in his search, and
the white man had treated him so kindly that he believed what Nando
said. But as the days passed and the canoes went farther and farther
up stream, miles away from Banonga, the boy began to be uneasy. More
than once he reminded Nando of his promise, only to be put off with
excuses: the white man was a very big chief, and such a trifling matter
as the whereabouts of a black boy's father and mother could not be
expected to engage him until his own business was completed.
Samba became more and more restless. He wished he could open the
matter himself to the white men; but the few words of English he had
picked up from Jack and Barney were as useless to him as any
schoolboy's French. Jack often wondered why there was so wistful a
look upon the boy's face as he followed him about, much as Pat followed
Samba. He spoke to Nando about it, but Nando only laughed. Samba
began to distrust Nando. What if the man's assurances were false, and
there had never been any intention of seeking his father? The white
men had been kind to him; they gave him good food; he was pleased with
the knife presented to him as a reward for his watchfulness; but all
these were small things beside the fact that his parents were lost to
him. Had the white men no fathers? he wondered.
At length he came to a great resolution. If they would not help him,
he must help himself. He would slip away one night and set off in
search. He well knew that in cutting himself adrift from the
expedition many days' journey from his old home he was exchanging ease
and plenty for certain hardship and many dangers known and unknown.
The forest in the neighbourhood of Banonga was as a playground to him;
but he could not know what awaited him in a country so remote as this.
He had never been more than half a day's journey from home, but he had
heard of unfriendly tribes who might kill him, or at best keep him
enslaved. And the white men of Bula Matadi--did not they sometimes
seize black boys, and make them soldiers or serfs? Yet all these
perils must be faced: Samba loved his parents, and in his case love
cast out fear.
One morning, very early, when every one in the camp was occupied with
the first duties of the day, Samba stole away. His own treasured knife
was slung by a cord about his neck; he carried on his hip,
negro-fashion, a discarded biscuit tin which he had filled with food
saved from his meals of the previous day; and Mr. Martindale's knife
dangled from his waist cord. It was easy to slip away unseen; the camp
was surrounded by trees, and within a minute he was out of sight. He
guessed that an hour or two would pass before his absence was
discovered, and then pursuit would be vain.
But he had not gone far when he heard a joyous bark behind him, and Pat
came bounding along, leaping up at him, looking up in his face, as if
to say: "You are going a-hunting: I will come too, and we will enjoy
ourselves." Samba stopped, and knelt down and put his arms about the
dog's neck. Should he take him? The temptation was great: Pat and he
were staunch friends; they understood each other, and the dog would be
excellent company in the forest. But Samba reflected. Pat did not
belong to him, and he had never stolen anything in his life. The dog's
master had been good to him: it would be unkind to rob him. And Pat
was a fighter: he was as brave as Samba himself, but a great deal more
noisy and much less discreet. Samba knew the ways of the forest; it
was wise to avoid the dangerous beasts, to match their stealth with
stealth; Pat would attack them, and certainly come off worst. No, Pat
must go back. So Samba patted him, rubbed his head on the dog's rough
coat, let Pat lick his face, and talked to him seriously. Then he got
up and pointed towards the camp and clapped his hands, and when Pat
showed a disposition still to follow him, he waved his arms and spoke
to him again. Pat understood; he halted and watched the boy till he
disappeared among the trees; then, giving one low whine, he trotted
back with his tail sorrowfully lowered.
Samba went on. He had come to the river, but he meant to avoid it now.
The river wound this way and that: the journey overland would be
shorter. He might be sought for along the bank; but in the forest
wilds he would at least be safe from pursuit, whatever other dangers he
might encounter. At intervals along the bank, too, lay many villages:
and Samba was less afraid of beasts than of men. So, choosing by the
instinct which every forest man seems to possess a direction that would
lead towards his distant village, he went on with lithe and springy
gait, humming an old song his grandfather Mirambo had taught him.
His path at first led through a grassy country, with trees and bush in
plenty, yet not so thick but that the sunlight came freely through the
foliage, making many shining circles on the ground. But after about
two hours the forest thickened; the sunlit spaces became fewer, the
undergrowth more and more tangled. At midday he sat down by the edge
of a trickling stream to eat his dinner of manioc, then set off again.
The forest was now denser than anything to which he had been accustomed
near Banonga, and he went more warily, his eyes keen to mark the tracks
of animals, his ears alive to catch every sound. He noticed here the
scratches of a leopard on a tree trunk, there the trampled undergrowth
where an elephant had passed; but he saw no living creature save a few
snakes and lizards, and once a hare that scurried across his path as he
approached. He knew that in the forest it is night that brings danger.
The forest became ever thicker, and as evening drew on it grew dark and
chill. The ground was soft with layers of rotted foliage, the air
heavy with the musty smell of vegetation in decay. Samba's teeth
chattered with the cold, and he could not help longing for Barney's
cosy hut and the warm companionship of the terrier. It was time to
sleep. Could he venture to build a fire? The smoke might attract men,
but he had seen no signs of human habitation. It would at any rate
repel insects and beasts. Yes--he would build a fire.
First he sought for a tree with a broad overhanging branch on which he
could perch himself for the night. Then he made a wide circuit to
assure himself that there were no enemies near at hand. In the course
of his round he came to a narrow clearing where an outcrop of rock had
prevented vegetation, and on the edges of this he found sufficient dry
brushwood to make his fire. Collecting an armful, he carried it
unerringly to his chosen tree, heaped it below the hospitable branch,
and with his knife whittled a hard dry stick to a sharp point. He
selected then a square lump of wood, cut a little hollow in it, and,
holding his pointed stick upright in the hollow, whirled it about
rapidly between his hands until first smoke then a spark appeared.
Having kindled his fire he banked it down with damp moss he found hard
by, so as to prevent it from blazing too high and endangering his tree
or attracting attention. Then he climbed up into the branch; there he
would be safest from prowling beasts. The acrid smoke rose from the
fire beneath and enveloped him, but it gave him no discomfort, rather a
feeling of "homeness" and well-being; such had been the accompaniment
of sleep all his life long in his father's hut at Banonga. Curled up
on that low bough he slept through the long hours--a dreamless sleep,
undisturbed by the bark of hyenas, the squeal of monkeys, or the wail
of tiger-cats.
When he awoke he was stiff and cold. It was still dark, but even at
midday the sun can but feebly light the thickest parts of the Congo
Forest. The fire had gone out; but Samba did not venture to leave his
perch until the glimmer of dawn, pale though it was, gave him light
enough to see by. He was ravenously hungry, and did not spare the food
left in his tin; many a time he had found food in the forest near his
home, and now that he felt well and strong, no fear of starvation
troubled him. Having finished his simple breakfast, he slung the empty
can over his hip and set off on his journey.
For two days he tramped on and on, plucking here the red berries of the
phrynia, there the long crimson fruit of the amoma, with mushrooms in
plenty. Nothing untoward had happened. In this part of the forest
beasts appeared to be few. Now and again he heard the rapping noise
made by the soko, the gibber of monkeys, the squawk of parrots: once he
stood behind a broad trunk and watched breathlessly as a tiger-cat
stalked a heedless rabbit; each night he lighted his fire and found a
serviceable branch on which to rest.
But on the third day he was less happy. The farther he walked, the
denser became the forest, the more difficult his path. Edible berries
were rarer; fewer trees had fungi growing about their roots; he had to
content himself with forest beans in their brown tough rind. When the
evening was drawing on he could find no dry fuel for a fire, and now,
instead of seeking a branch for a sleeping place, he looked for a
hollow tree which would give him some shelter from the cold damp air of
night. Having found his tree he gathered a handful of moss, set fire
to it from his stick and block, which he had carefully preserved, and
threw the smouldering heap into the hollow to smoke out noxious
insects, or a snake, if perchance one had made his home there.
The fourth day was a repetition of the third, with more discomforts.
Sometimes the tangled vines and creepers were so thick that he had to
go round about to find a path. The vegetation provided still less
food, only a few jack fruit and the wild fruit of the motanga rewarding
his search. He was so hungry at midday that he was reduced to
collecting slugs from the trees, a fare he would fain have avoided.
Fearless as he was, he was beginning to be anxious; for to make a
certain course in this dense forest was well-nigh impossible.
At dusk, when again he sought a hollow tree and dropped a heap of
smouldering herbage into the hole, he started back with a low cry, for
he heard an ominous hiss in the depths, and was only just in time to
avoid a python which had been roused from sleep by the burning mass.
In a twinkling the huge coils spread themselves like a released
watch-spring beyond the mouth of the hole and along the lowermost
branch of the tree. With all his forest lore, Samba was surprised to
find that a python could move so quickly. The instant he heard the
angry hiss he crouched low against the trunk, thankful that the reptile
had chosen a branch on the other side. Armed only with a knife, he
knew himself no match for a twenty-foot python; had he not seen a young
hippopotamus strangled by a python no larger than this? Like Brer
Rabbit, Samba lay low and said nothing: until the python, swinging
itself on to the branch of an adjacent tree a few feet away,
disappeared in the foliage. Then, allowing time for the reptile to
settle elsewhere, Samba sought safer quarters. The python's house was
comfortable, even commodious; but Samba would scarcely have slept as
soundly as he was wont in uncertainty whether the disturbed owner might
not after all return home.
He felt very cramped and miserable when he rose next day to resume his
journey. This morning he had to start without breakfast, for neither
fruits nor berries were to be had: a search among fallen trees failed
even to discover ants of which to make a scanty meal. Constant walking
and privation were telling on his frame; his eyes were less bright, his
step was less elastic. But there was a great heart within him; he
plodded on; he had set out to find his father and mother; he would not
turn back. The dangers ahead could be no worse than those he had
already met, and no experienced general of army could have known better
than Samba that to retreat is often more perilous than to advance.
In the afternoon, when, having found a few berries, he had eaten the
only meal of the day and was about to seek, earlier than usual, his
quarters for the night, he heard, from a short distance to the left of
his track, a great noise of growling and snarling. The sounds were not
like those of any animals he knew. With cautious steps he made his way
through the matted undergrowth towards the noise. Almost unawares he
came upon an extraordinary sight. In the centre of an open space,
scarcely twenty feet across, a small man, lighter in hue than the
majority of Congolese natives, was struggling to free himself from the
grip of a serval which had buried its claws deep in his body and thigh.
Two other small men, less even than Samba in height, were leaping and
yelling around their comrade, apparently instructing him how to act,
though neither made use of the light spears they carried to attack the
furious beast. The serval, its greenish eyes brilliant with rage, was
an unusually powerful specimen of its kind, resembling indeed a leopard
rather than a tiger-cat. It was bent, as it seemed, upon working its
way upward to the man's throat, and its reddish spotted coat was so
like his skin in hue that, as they writhed and twisted this way and
that, an onlooker might well have hesitated to launch a spear at the
beast for fear of hitting the man.
One of the little man's hands had a grip of the serval's throat; but he
was not strong enough to strangle it, and the lightning quickness of
the animal's movements prevented him from gripping it with the other
hand. Even a sturdily-built European might well have failed to gain
the mastery in a fight with such a foe, and the little man had neither
the strength nor the staying power to hold out much longer. Yet his
companions continued to yell and dance round, keeping well out of reach
of the terrible claws; while blood was streaming from a dozen deep
gashes in the little man's body.
Samba stood but a few moments gazing at the scene. The instinct of the
born hunter was awake in him, and that higher instinct which moves a
man to help his kind. Clutching his broad knife he bounded into the
open, reached the fainting man in two leaps, and plunged the blade deep
into the creature's side behind the shoulder. With a convulsive
wriggle the serval made a last attempt to bury its fangs in its
victim's neck. Then its muscles suddenly relaxed, and it fell dead to
the ground.
Samba's intervention had come too late. The man had been so terribly
mauled that his life was ebbing fast. His comrades looked at him and
began to make strange little moaning cries; then they laid him on a bed
of leaves and turned their attention to Samba. He knew that he was in
the presence of Bambute, the dreaded pigmies of the forest. Never
before had he seen them; but he had heard of them as fearless hunters
and daring fighters, who moved about from place to place in the forest,
and levied toll upon the plantations of larger men. The two little men
came to him and patted his arms and jabbered together; but he
understood nothing of what they said. By signs he explained to them
that he was hungry. Then, leaving their wounded comrade to his fate,
they took Samba by the hands and led him rapidly into the forest,
following a path which could scarcely have been detected by any except
themselves. In some twenty minutes they arrived at a clearing where
stood a group of two score small huts, like beehives, no more than four
feet high, with an opening eighteen inches square, just large enough to
allow a pigmy to creep through. Pigmies, men and women, were squatting
around--ugly little people, but well-made and muscular, with leaves and
grass aprons for all clothing, and devoid of such ornaments as an
ordinary negro loves.
They sprang up as Samba approached between his guides, and a great
babel of question and answer arose, like the chattering of monkeys.
The story was told; none showed any concern for the man left to die;
the Bambute acknowledge no ties, and seem to have little family
affection. A plentiful dinner of antelope flesh and bananas was soon
placed before Samba, and it was clear that the pigmies were ready to
make much of the stranger who had so boldly attacked the serval.
One of them knew a little of a Congolese dialect, and he succeeded in
making Samba understand that the chief was pleased with him, and wished
to adopt him as his son. Samba shook his head and smiled: his own
parents were alive, he said; he wished for no others. This made the
chief angry. The chiefs of some of the big men had often adopted pigmy
boys and made slaves of them; it was now his turn. The whole community
scowled and snarled so fiercely that Samba thought the safest course
was to feign acquiescence for the moment, and seize the first
opportunity afterwards of slipping away.
But nearly three weeks passed before a chance presented itself. The
pigmies kept him with them, never letting him go out of their sight.
They fed him well--almost too well, expecting his powers of consumption
to be equal to their own. Never before had he seen such extraordinary
eaters. One little man would squat before a stalk bearing fifty or
sixty bananas, and eat them all. True, he lay moaning and groaning all
night, but next morning would be quite ready to gorge an equal meal.
Since they did not cultivate the ground themselves, Samba wondered
where they obtained their plentiful supply of bananas and manioc. He
learnt by and by that they appropriated what they pleased from the
plantations of a neighbouring tribe of big men, who had too great a
respect for the pigmies' poisoned arrows and spears to protest. Samba
hoped that he might one day escape to this tribe, but a shifting of the
village rendered this impossible, though it afforded the boy the
opportunity for which he had so long been waiting.
On the night when the pigmy tribe settled down in its new home, four
days' journey from the old, Samba took advantage of the fatigue of his
captors to steal away. He had chosen the darkest hour before the dawn,
and knowing that he would very soon be missed and followed up, he
struck off through the forest as rapidly as he could. With plentiful
food he had recovered his old strength and vigour, and he strode along
fleetly, finding his way chiefly by the nature of the ground beneath
his feet; for there was no true path, and the forest was almost
completely dark, even when dawn had broken elsewhere. As the morning
drew on the leafy arcades became faintly illuminated, and he could then
see sufficiently well to choose the easiest way through the obstacles
that beset his course.
Despite all his exertions his progress was very slow. Well he knew
that, expert though he was in forest travel, he could not move through
these tangled mazes with anything like the speed of the active little
men who by this time were almost certainly on his track. At the best
he could hardly have got more than two miles' start. As he threaded
his way through the brushwood, hacking with his knife at obstructive
creepers, and receiving many a scratch from briar and thorn, he tried
to think of some way of throwing the pursuers off the scent; but every
yard of progress demanded so much exertion that he was unequal to the
effort of devising any likely ruse.
Suddenly coming upon a shallow stream about two yards wide that ran
across his line of march, he saw in a flash a chance of covering his
trail. He stepped into the stream, pausing for a moment to drink, then
waded a few paces against the current, narrowly scanning the bordering
trees. They showed a close network of interlacing branches, one tree
encroaching on another. Choosing a bough overhanging the brook, just
above his head, Samba drew himself up into the tree, taking care that
no spots of water were left on the branch to betray him. Then,
clambering nimbly like a monkey from bough to bough, he made a path for
himself through the trees at an angle half-way between the directions
of the stream and of his march through the forest. He hoped that,
losing his track in the stream, the Bambute would jump to the
conclusion that he was making his way up or down its bed, and would
continue their chase accordingly.
Among the trees his progress was even slower than on the ground. Every
now and again he had to return on his tracks, encountering a branch
that, serviceable as it might look, proved either too high or too low,
or not strong enough to bear his weight. And he was making more noise
than he liked. There was not only the rustle and creak of parting
leaves and bending twigs, and the crack of small branches that snapped
under his hand; but his intrusion scared the natural denizens of the
forest, and they clattered away with loud cries of alarm--grey parrots
in hundreds, green pigeons, occasionally a hawk or the great blue
plantain-eater. The screeches of the birds smothered, indeed, any
sound that he himself might make; but such long-continued evidence of
disturbance might awaken the suspicion of the little men and guide them
to his whereabouts.
By and by he came to a gap in the forest. The clear sunlight was
welcome as a guide to his course; but he saw that to follow the
direction which he believed would bring him towards Banonga he must now
leave the trees. He stopped for a few minutes to recover breath, and
to consider what he had best do. As he lay stretched along a bough,
his eye travelled back over the path he had come. The vagaries of
lightning that had struck down two forest giants in close proximity
disclosed to his view a stretch of some twenty yards of the stream
which he had just crossed on his primeval suspension bridge. What
caused him to start and draw himself together, shrinking behind a leafy
screen thick enough to hide him even from the practised eyes of the
little forest men? There, in the bed of the stream, glancing this way
and that, at the water, the banks, the trees on every side, were a file
of Bambute, carrying their little bows and arrows and their short light
spears. They moved swiftly, silently, some bending towards the ground,
others peering to right and left with a keenness that nothing could
escape. Samba's heart thumped against his ribs as he watched them. He
counted them as they passed one after another across the gap; they
numbered twenty, and he was not sure that he had seen the first.
The last disappeared. Samba waited. Had his ruse succeeded? There
was absolute silence; he heard neither footstep nor voice. But the
little men must soon find out their mistake. They would then cast back
to the point where they had lost the scent. Could they pick it up
again--trace him to the tree and follow him up? He could not tell.
They must have been close upon him when he climbed into the tree;
evidently he had left the path only in the nick of time. This much he
had gained. But he dared not wait longer; there was no safety for him
while they were so near; he must on.