The Boy Who Stole The Leopard's Spots Part 22

Meet Tamar Myers.

TAMAR MYERS was born and raised in the Belgian Congo (now just the Congo). Her parents were missionaries to a tribe which, at that time, were known as headhunters and used human skulls for drinking cups. Hers was the first white family ever to peacefully coexist with the tribe.

Tamar grew up eating elephant, hippopotamus, and even monkey. She attended a boarding school that was two days away by truck, and sometimes it was necessary to wade through crocodile-infested waters to reach it. Other dangers she encountered as a child were cobras, deadly green mambas, and the voracious armies of driver ants that ate every animal (and human) that didn't get out of their way.

Today Tamar lives in the Carolinas with her American-born husband. She is the author of thirty-seven novels (most of which are mysteries), a number of published short stories, and hundreds of articles on gardening.

About the book.

Leopard Tales.

Leopards (PANTHERA PARDUS) were found throughout the Belgian Congo, where they were strongly a.s.sociated with witchcraft and believed to be endowed with magical powers. Although much smaller than lions, leopards are incredibly strong for their size and capable of hauling antelope high into trees for safekeeping. They are solitary cats, which along with their spotted fur ensures that they are seldom seen by humans. As is the case with lions and tigers, there are confirmed cases of leopards becoming man-eaters. Black panthers are merely a melanistic form of the regular leopard.

In the area where I grew up, there were no large herds of herbivores such as one might see in East Africa. This was due in part to the practice of burning the savannahs once a year to kill game. As the herds of antelope and zebra were exterminated, the lions either met the same fate or else moved on. Some antelope species were better adapted to living a solitary existence, and each year enough of them survived to repopulate their particular niche.

The leopard, being much smaller than the lion and thus requiring less food, was also able to hold its own. When its delicate nostrils picked up the scent of burning elephant gra.s.s at the end of the dry season, these majestic spotted cats would slink into the safety of the nearest riverine forest. From where I lived, up on the high savannah, it seemed that every gully soon deepened into a tree-shaded ravine that gave birth to a spring of pure, untainted water. Follow the spring, and one would surely find a river and even deeper forest.

Therefore, it was the leopard that reigned as King of the Beasts among the people of the Kasai. Not only was the leopard cunning, it possessed certain magical powers. For instance, a leopard had the ability to change its shape. This attribute explained how it was that an animal this large could sneak into a village at night and leave with a goat-or a person-and not be seen.

As a living leopard possesses magical powers, so too does a leopard skin. For that reason, only a powerful chief or king may wear a leopard skin. Mobutu, who was the dictator of Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), wore a leopard skin hat. If a village chief wanted to have his subjects swear a loyalty oath, he would have them kneel on a leopard skin while they did so.

I was a child of missionaries who never broached such talk with me, so I must have heard it from my friends, or possibly from my "child-minders." Whatever the case may be, all these years later, I still feel uneasy around leopard-related items (although I have a cat who is part Asian Leopard Cat!).

For instance, I would not feel comfortable sleeping in a room that contains a leopard skin or a leopard skull. It doesn't make any sense, but there it is. However, I do posses a fabulous necklace, a.s.sembled for me by fellow author Faith Hunter, which is made from genuine leopard claws. I call this my "mojo" necklace, and I wear it whenever I speak about Africa, or when I need to call forth special courage.

The claws in this necklace come from a leopard that my papa shot sometime in the 1930s. The leopard had managed to break into our goat enclosure and had killed one of our goats. We kept the skin for many years, and I remember it draped over the back of our couch as late as 1960. By day the living room was exotic; by night it was spooky.

Somewhere along the line I became the keeper of the claws. I kept them in a box, out of sight, until I was almost sixty. When I first showed them to my friend Faith Hunter, she squealed with delight. There are eight of these enormous claws-think of your cat's claws made ten times bigger. I chose carnelian and black agate as the accompanying stones, and since the claws are hollow at the wide end we glued them to cowry sh.e.l.ls. From the center of the necklace hangs an ivory amulet of the sort a witch doctor would wear. Knowing my papa, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that he actually bought it from a witch doctor. Do you see what I mean about this necklace having mojo?

My papa, may his memory be for a blessing, was a very interesting man. An inquisitive man. He is the only person I've ever met who used to rue the day that he pa.s.sed up the chance to buy a drum that had a human navel on the drum skin (although perhaps not that many people have vendors showing up at their back door trying to sell them a drum with a belly b.u.t.ton in the center).

My uncle Ernie, who was my mama's youngest brother, lived with us for a while when he was in his early twenties. The roads in our remote location consisted of two dirt tracks with a strip of gra.s.s growing down the middle. During the rainy seasons the roads became so washed out they became treacherous, and it wasn't uncommon to hear of a vehicle that had broken an axle. In the long dry season, the road would send up so much dust that I found it hard to breath because of a perpetually stopped-up nose.

Nevertheless, it was always exciting to travel at dusk, and then into the night. As the sun dropped low in the western sky, the francolins (a quail-like bird) would wander into the road, and whoever was driving would immediately stop so that the men in the car-or truck-could hop out and fire off a shot. If we were really fortunate, we'd run into a flock of guinea hens, which were much larger birds. Both made for good eating, just as long as Mama didn't serve you the piece that contained the bullet hole.

Also at dusk we stood a good chance of encountering jackals in the road. It must be said here that we were Mennonites of Amish descent, coming from many generations of strictly pacifist ancestors. However, our prohibition against killing did not apply to animals. On a number of occasions, I sat holding my breath as the Mennonite driver of our panel truck raced down our perilous roads trying to run over a jackal (sometimes even a jackal with pups at her side!). Why would a Mennonite man do this? For the thrill of the hunt, I suppose. Why did the jackal invariably run down the exposed dirt lane for a good bit before darting into the safety of the thick elephant gra.s.s that grew on either side? I haven't a clue. At any rate, if I remember correctly, the jackal survived about fifty percent of the time.

But it was when darkness fell that the fun really began. There is something to be said for the excitement generated by "safe fear": sitting out a bodacious thunderstorm in front of your fireplace, riding a roller coaster, or watching a horror movie. The headlights of vehicles were reflected by the animal life in the road, and the animals, confused and temporarily blinded, froze. Once, when Uncle Ernie was driving the panel truck and we three nieces were along for the ride, he struck gold. After all, how many young men back in Indiana get to claim that they ran over a leopard?

So Uncle Ernie pressed the pedal to the metal, and thanks to the headlights, he didn't even have to chase the cat. After admiring his trophy, he hoisted it into the back of the panel truck and continued on his merry way. The only problem was that the truck had only one bench seat up front, and it was already occupied by my parents. We three girls had been riding in the back, seated on our "sitters," as Mama called our behinds. And now we were joined by a dead leopard.

Or was it dead? Its amber eyes were still open, and although its tongue hung out, its lips were pulled back in a perpetual snarl, the fangs clearly visible. What's more, with every b.u.mp generated by the hideous conditions of that road, the leopard's extended right paw would jiggle. In fact, there were times when we bounced so much the leopard appeared to lurch right at us. The combined shrieks of three girls aged eight, seven, and three were almost enough to make our uncle wish that he had politely honked and waited while the big cat came to its senses and slunk off into the bush.

The following year, with our uncle safely back in America with his precious leopard skin, we made a long trek to pick up my two oldest sisters from boarding school. Although there were very few roads, none of them were marked and there was never any traffic. A breakdown could mean a night spent in the bush without food or water (although we always tried to be prepared). At any rate, as were approaching the mission station with the boarding school, we somehow took a wrong turn. Because the trip had taken so long, it was dark by then, and "fun scary"-just as long as my papa didn't try to run over one of the world's fourth-largest cats.

All of a sudden, I heard him say, "This is the way to the leopard colony!"

"Are you sure?" Mama asked.

"Yes, it's all coming back to me. The last time we came here we almost made the same mistake. We were supposed to turn left at the crossroads, not right. The leopard colony is another twenty kilometers down this road. We're going to have to look for a place to turn around, which isn't going to be easy with all this mud. If we get stuck, you can count on spending the night in the truck."

"What about the leopards?" I whimpered. "I have to go to the bathroom, remember? You told me to wait, but I really, really have to go."

We jolted to a stop. "Crawl over the seat," Mama said gently, "and get out on my side. You can do it right here beside the truck. No one is going to see you."

"But the leopards will eat me!"

"What?" Papa said.

"That colony of leopards!" I began to sob.

"I think she heard us talking about the leper colony," Mama said. "It was foolish of Ernie to do what he did. I could just wring his neck. The poor child's been terrified of leopards ever since that night."

She was right; I had misunderstood. However, it would be another decade before I attended that same boarding school and learned about the leper colony. It was a special village where folks afflicted with this disease lived in total isolation, except for visits from medical missionaries. By then I was no longer afraid of lepers, but I was still terrified of leopards.

My parents had been pioneers, leasing land from the Belgian government and starting a brand-new mission. In the beginning, it was just us and Uncle Ernie. Then he left. But after a few years, we were joined by another family. Of course, we had no amenities out there in the middle of nowhere-no running water, no electricity on a regular basis, no telephones.

In the evenings, upon occasion, my parents wished to get a message over to the other missionary family. It would be dark, and the servants would have long since been dismissed for the day. For some reason, the task of delivering the note would fall upon me. It was something I dreaded, and I whined to get out of doing it. At night sometimes there were hyenas and jackals about, not to mention snakes, and of course there was always the matter of the tree.

The distance between the two houses might have been only the length of two football fields, but because of all the fear the tree conjured up, it might as well have been ten miles. There was nothing special about this tree; it didn't even offer shade. At night it resembled a child's charcoal drawing of one: a black stick with a black cloud for a top. What made it ominous to me was the fact that it had been left standing directly adjacent to the footpath that connected our respective dwellings.

I was always handed a flashlight and told to point it down toward the path and keep a sharp lookout for snakes. Instead, I kept it pointed at the tree's canopy-even when I was too far away to see anything. There was a leopard up there just waiting to pounce on me, clamp its jaws around my throat, and then pull me up into the inky darkness of the canopy. The next morning my parents would find the flashlight-and maybe a few strands of my golden locks-on the path below, but that's it. That would sure show them.

Still, as much as I wanted my parents to regret forcing me to carry a note under the "leopard tree" at night, I didn't fancy having my jugular vein severed, or my innards pulled out, or the rest of me chewed up and swallowed by an overgrown cat. The entire distance between the two houses was too far for me to cover by running, so I walked. But I stopped walking just before I reached the spot where I thought the leopard might land on me. That's where I said my last "help me Jesus" prayer and ran like the Devil himself was after me. I ran until I nearly collapsed on the dirt path, which wasn't all that far. So, as soon as I could manage it, I looked behind me. Nope, I hadn't been followed. So far, so good. However, that was only half the battle; I still had the return trip.

"You didn't get eaten, did you?" Papa asked as he opened the door for me.

"Not this time," I said.

Papa chuckled. "I keep telling you that there is no reason for a leopard to hide in that tree and wait for days and days until the next time I need you to carry a message. Not with a forest full of animals just a kilometer away."

"Maybe it was a visiting leopard and didn't know about the forest." I had an argument for everything back then. My husband says I still do.

"If you want, tomorrow I'll post signs in leopardese informing visiting leopards of where they can hunt, and where they can't. And there is to be absolutely no climbing of that tree, and I'll be demanding a very strict penalty from any leopard that takes my pretty little girl out to dinner uninvited."

I tried to repress a giggle, so it came out as a snort, which caused me to giggle even more. "There is no such language as leopardese."

"That's what you say because you can't speak it."

"Can you?"

Papa nodded.

"Then say something."

"Grrrrrrr."

Read on

Have You Read?

More by Tamar Myers.

THE WITCH DOCTOR'S WIFE.

The Congo beckons to young Amanda Brown in 1958, as she follows her missionary calling to the mysterious "dark continent" far from her South Carolina home. But her enthusiasm cannot cus.h.i.+on her from the shock of a very foreign culture-where competing missionaries are as plentiful as flies, and oppressive European overlords are busy stripping the land of its most valuable resource: diamonds.

Little by little, Amanda is drawn into the lives of the villagers in tiny Belle Vue-and she is touched by the plight of the local witch doctor, a man known as Their Death, who has been forced to take a second job as a yardman to support his two wives. But when First Wife stumbles upon an impossibly enormous uncut gem, events are set in motion that threaten to devastate the lives of these people Amanda has come to admire and love-events that could lead to nothing less than murder.

THE HEADHUNTER'S DAUGHTER.

In 1945, an infant left inadvertently to die in the jungles of the Belgian Congo is discovered by a young Bas.h.i.+lele tribesman on a mission to claim the head of an enemy. Recognized as human-despite her pale white skin and strange blue eyes-the baby is brought into the tribe and raised as its own. Thirteen years later, the girl-now called "Ugly Eyes"- will find herself at the center of a controversy that will rock two separate societies.

Young missionary Amanda Brown hears the incredible stories of a white girl living among the Bas.h.i.+lele headhunters. In the company of the local police chief, Captain Pierre Jardin, and with the witch doctor's wife, the quick-witted Cripple, along as translator, Amanda heads into the wild hoping to bring the lost girl back to "civilization." But Ugly Eyes no longer belongs in their world-and the secrets surrounding her birth and disappearance are placing them all in far graver peril than anyone ever imagined.

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Also by Tamar Myers.

The Headhunter's Daughter.

The Witch Doctor's Wife.

Den of Antiquities Mysteries.

The Gla.s.s Is Always Greener.

Poison Ivory.

Death of a Rug Lord The Cane Mutiny.

Monet Talks Statue of Limitations Tiles and Tribulations.

Splendor in the Gla.s.s.

Nightmare in s.h.i.+ning Armor.

A Penny Urned Estate of Mind.

Baroque and Desperate.

So Faux, So Good The Ming and I.

Gilt by a.s.sociation.

Larceny and Old Lace.

end.