on me. I can see its great, beautiful, lambent eyes still,
and I seized an earthen water-cooler and flung it straight at
them. It was a noble shot; it burst on the leopard’s head like
a shell and the leopard went for bush one time. Twenty
minutes after people began to drop in cautiously and inquire
if anything was the matter, and I civilly asked them to go
and ask the leopard in the bush, but they firmly refused. We
found the dog had got her shoulder slit open as if by a blow
from a cutlass, and the leopard had evidently seized the dog
by the scruff of her neck, but owing to the loose folds of skin
no bones were broken and she got round all right after much
ointment from me, which she paid me for with several bites.
Do not mistake this for a sporting adventure. I no more
thought it was a leopard than that it was a lotus when I joined
the fight. My other leopard was also after a dog. Leopards
always come after dogs, because once upon a time the leOpard
and the dog were great friends, and the leopard went out one
day and left her whelps in charge of the dog, and the dog
went out flirting, and a snake came and killed the whelps, so
there is ill-feeling to this day between the two. For the
benefit of sporting readers whose interest may have been
excited by the mention of big game, I may remark that the
largest leopard skin 1 ever measured myself was, tail included,
9 feet 7 inches. It was a dried skin, and every man who saw
it said, “ It was the largest skin he had ever seen, except one
that he had seen somewhere else.”
The largest crocodile I ever measured was 22 feet 3 inches,
the largest gorilla 5 feet 7 inches. I am assured by the missionaries
in Calabar, that there was a python brought into
Creek Town in the Rev. Mr. Goldie’s time, that extended the
whole length of the Creek Town mission-house verandah and
to spare. This python must have been over 40 feet. I haye
not a shadow of doubt it was. Stay-at-home people will
always discredit great measurements, but experienced bush-
men do not, and after all, if it amuses the stay-at-homes to do
so, by all means let them ; they have dull lives of it and it
don’t hurt you, for you know how exceedingly difficult it is to
preserve really big things to bring home, and how, half the
time, they fall into the hands of people who would not bother
their heads to preserve them in a rotting climate like West
Africa.
The largest python skin I ever measured was a damaged one,
which was 26 feet. There is an immense one hung in front
of a house in San Paul de Loanda which you can go and
measure yourself with comparative safety any day, and which is,
I think, over 20 feet. I never measured this one. The common
run of pythons is 10-15 feet, or rather I should say this is
about the sized one you find with painful frequency in your
chicken-house.
OftheLubuku secret society I can speak with no personal
knowledge. I had a great deal of curious information regarding
it from a Bakele woman, who had her information secondhand,
but it bears out what Captain Latrobe Bateman says
about it in his most excellent book The First Ascent o f the
Kasai (George Phillip, 1889), and to his account in Note J
of the Appendix, I beg to refer the ethnologist. My information
also went to show what he calls “ a dark inference as to
its true nature,” a nature not universally common by any
means to the African tribal secret society.
In addition to the secret society and the leopard society,
there are in the Delta some ju-jus held only by a few great
chiefs. The one in Bonny has a complete language to itself,
and.there is one in Duke Town so powerful that should you
desire the death of any person you have only to go and name
|him before it. “ These ju-jus are very swift and sure.” I
would rather drink than fight with any of them— yes, far.