The Hunter and the Ape with Sixteen Tails
An Ọ̀yọ́ tale in which a hunter stakes his life against a village head's on the existence of a sixteen-tailed ape, plays dead to kill it, and wins a bet the community afterwards condemns.
This is the first tale in Parkinson's 1909 collection, and it is subtitled by the collector "showing how wrong it is to make heavy bets" . A hunter tells a village head, the Bále, that he has seen an ape with sixteen tails. The Bále has never heard of such a creature. They wager their lives on it. The hunter kills the ape by playing dead, produces the body, and the Bále is executed, after which the people declare that no one should make bets on such terms. Collected by John Parkinson from Ọ̀yọ́ informants .
It is one of two tales in this section with a hunter as protagonist, and one of very few sourced Yorùbá narratives in which apes act as a group with a chief.
The tale
A hunter arrived at a certain village one day and told the Bále that he had seen an ape with sixteen tails. Parkinson's editor notes the number: "note the common occurrence of the number sixteen in Yoruba myth," referring to Ellis . Sixteen is the organising number of the Ifá system, treated in ifa-256-odu.
The Bále replied that he had never seen or heard of such a beast.
Then said the hunter: come into the bush and see this ape. And he stipulated that if it was indeed as he said, the Bále should be put to death, but that if he lied, his own life should be forfeit. To this the Bále agreed, and the hunter affirmed that he would produce the ape.
Then the hunter went into the bush and, covering himself with dirt and horrid things, lay down in a path frequented by the apes.
In a short while one of the apes approached, and seeing the hunter lying down, shook him; but the hunter lay like one dead. Then the ape went back to the others and told them what he had seen. And the chief ape, the ape with sixteen tails, said: go and see.
And they ran and saw the hunter lying in the path, and they bent over him and shook him, singing in chorus:
The Yorùbá is not given. Parkinson prints this in English only .
Not recorded in source .
Come and see the dead hunter.
Translator: John Parkinson
They said that he was dead, but they left the bow in his right hand and the arrows in his left.
Then the apes all went back to the chief ape and said: it is true that the hunter is dead, for he is getting rotten and worms are inside him.
Then the chief ape said: it is true. And added that he too would go and see for himself.
Then the ape with sixteen tails came, and bending over the hunter said: ah, I have you now, you who have killed several of my people. And he shook him. But the hunter was ready, and sprang up and knocked the ape down and killed him.
The hunter carried the ape home and hid it in the house, and again went to the Bále and said: it is a fact. And he added that he was ready to prove his words, reminding him of the conditions.
Then the hunter went into the town and told all the people that they should meet in a certain place and hear the conditions of the bet made with the Bále concerning the ape with sixteen tails, and that the Bále should die if the hunter proved correct, and the reverse if not.
And to these things the people consented, and to the conditions of the bet, saying that if the chief of the apes with sixteen tails could be produced they would kill the Bále.
When the appointed day arrived the hunter took the body of the ape with the sixteen tails and showed it to the people and to the Bále. And the Bále was slain.
But the people all said that no one should make bets on such terms, whether the conditions were to be truly carried out or not.
What the tale does
The mechanism is that the hunter wins by supplying his opponents with exactly the evidence they are looking for, and the tale runs it twice on two different audiences.
Against the apes, the trick is a corpse. He does not hide; he lies in a path they use, covered in filth, and lets them examine him. The apes conduct a genuine investigation: a scout comes, then a delegation, then the chief himself. They shake him, they observe that he is rotting and full of worms, and they conclude reasonably from real evidence. Their one error is what they leave alone. Parkinson's telling is precise about it: "they left the bow in his right hand and the arrows in his left." A dead man's weapons are not a threat, so nobody disarms him.
The chief ape's own line is the sharpest thing in the tale. Bending over what he believes is a corpse, he says: ah, I have you now, you who have killed several of my people. He is not merely deceived; he is deceived at the exact moment of taking satisfaction in a victory he did not win. That is the same shape as Ìjàpá's cry to the drum in alo-ijapa-singing-drum, a triumphant speech delivered into a situation the speaker has entirely misread.
Against the village, the trick is procedure. Having killed the ape, the hunter hides the body, returns to the Bále, reasserts the claim, reminds him of the terms, and then, before producing anything, gathers the whole town and gets them to consent to the conditions in advance. Only after the community has publicly agreed that they would kill the Bále does he show the body. The corpus notes as analysis that the hiding of the corpse is the key move: it converts a private wager between two men into a public undertaking that the town has ratified, so that when the evidence appears there is no one left who can object.
The closing verdict
The last sentence is what makes this tale worth its place, and it is doing something unusual:
But the people all said that no one should make bets on such terms, whether the conditions were to be truly carried out or not.
The community carries out the sentence and then condemns the arrangement that produced it. They do not say the Bále was innocent, or that the hunter cheated, or that the wager was unproven. They say that this kind of bet should not be made, and the qualifying clause, "whether the conditions were to be truly carried out or not," makes the objection sharper: the wrong is in the staking, not in the enforcement.
Parkinson's own subtitle, "showing how wrong it is to make heavy bets," reports the same reading , and it is the collector telling us what his teller said the tale was for.
This is the communal-judgement resolution that yoruba-alo identifies as characteristic of the Ìjàpá cycle, appearing here in a human tale with a difference worth marking: the judgement lands on nobody. The Bále is dead, the hunter is not punished, and the verdict is a general principle issued after the fact. The corpus notes that a tale which allows a clever man to kill a village head by procedure and then closes with the community disowning the procedure is a more uncomfortable piece of moral instruction than a simple punishment tale, and that it is Parkinson's teller, not this compiler, who framed it as being about the wrongness of the wager rather than the cleverness of the hunter.
The ape
The chief ape has sixteen tails, leads a community, sends scouts, evaluates their reports, and comes to verify in person. He speaks. He has lost several of his people to this hunter and knows it.
The corpus records that this is the fullest characterisation of apes or monkeys as social actors that this compiler located in the sourced Yorùbá record, and that it is not a trickster role. alo-what-is-not-here sets out the finding that no Ìjímèrè monkey-trickster cycle could be sourced, and the material that does exist, here and in the Frobenius passages noted there, shows monkeys as counsellors, victims and communities rather than as schemers.
Variants
No Yorùbá-language version and no second collection of this tale were located by this compiler. The record consulted is silent.
Performance context
Evening telling, treated in yoruba-alo. The apes' line "come and see the dead hunter" is marked by Parkinson as sung in chorus, which makes it the audience's part, and it is sung by characters who are wrong about what they are looking at. The tale's rhythm is three approaches to the same body, scout, delegation, chief, which is the counting structure common across this section.