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 I
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 have not a shadow of doubt it was. Stay-at-
home people will always discredit great measurements, but
experienced bushmen 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.
Of the Lubuku 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 second-hand, but it bears out what
Captain Latrobe Bateman says about it in his most excellent book The
First Ascent of 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.
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