The Leopard-Man

This is a cautionary tale about a maiden who falls in love with a handsome stranger who never speaks in the village, follows him into the forest against three explicit warnings, and discovers he is a leopard permitted to walk as a man once a month. He hunts her; a tree takes pity and falls across a river so she can cross; she reaches the village exhausted and alive. Recorded in English by M. I. Ogumefu in 1929 1.

It is the fullest narrative treatment of Ekùn the leopard as a character that this compiler was able to source, and it comes with a significant loss attached, discussed below.

The songs are missing

This tale contains three songs and not one of them survives. Ogumefu reports each in indirect speech: the stranger under the tree "began to sing a melancholy song, in which he told her that though he was allowed once a month to wander about in villages and towns like a man, he was in reality a savage leopard and would rend her in pieces as soon as he regained his natural form"; and during the pursuit "he sang that he would tear her in small pieces, and she in another song replied that he would never overtake her" 1.

So the tale's central revelation and its entire chase sequence were sung, and the record consulted preserves only their content. This is the caveat Ogumefu states in her own preface, that the tales "include very old songs, but these cannot here be given in full" 1, operating on the single tale where it costs most. alo-ogumefu-1929-as-a-source sets out the general problem.

What is lost is not decoration. On the evidence of the reported content, the chase was antiphonal, threat answered by defiance, which is the same structure as the goblin's road-song in alo-the-palm-oil-seller-and-the-goblin and the accusation duel in alo-ijapa-and-the-dumb-princess. In performance this would have been the section the audience carried. The corpus records the loss as a loss and does not reconstruct.

The tale

A handsome stranger walked silently through a village, and all the maidens admired him and wished he would choose one of them for his bride 1. But he said nothing, and at last walked away into the forest and disappeared.

A month later he came again, and this time one of the maidens fell so much in love with him that she resolved to follow him into the forest, since she could not bear to be separated from him 1.

When the stranger looked back and saw her coming behind him, he stopped and begged her to return home 1. But she would not, and exclaimed:

I will never leave you, and wherever you go, I will follow.

Beautiful maiden, you will regret it, replied the stranger sadly, as he hurried on.

After a while he stopped again and once more begged her to retrace her steps 1. She made the same reply, and again he said, in sorrowful tones:

You will regret it, beautiful maiden!

They went far into the depths of the forest, and at length reached a tree at the foot of which lay a leopard-skin 1. Standing under the tree, the stranger sang the song that tells her what he is: that though he is allowed once a month to wander about in villages and towns like a man, he is in reality a savage leopard, and will rend her in pieces as soon as he regains his natural form.

With these words he flung himself upon the ground and immediately became a snarling leopard, and began to pursue the terrified girl 1.

But fear gave such speed to her feet that he could not overtake her 1. As he pursued her he sang that he would tear her in small pieces, and she in another song replied that he would never overtake her.

For a great distance they ran, and then the maiden suddenly came to a deep but narrow river which she could not cross. It seemed as if the leopard would catch her after all. But a tree standing on the river bank took pity on her and fell across the river, so that she was able to cross.

At last, nearly exhausted, she came to the edge of the forest and reached the village in safety. The leopard, disappointed of its prey, slunk back into the forest, and the handsome stranger was never seen again.

What the tale does

The mechanism is that the danger identifies itself repeatedly and is not believed, and the tale is careful to make the warnings come from the predator. The leopard stops twice on the road to beg her to go back, and Ogumefu marks his manner both times, "sadly" and "in sorrowful tones." He then tells her exactly what he is in a song, before transforming. He is not luring her. He is trying to get rid of her, and failing, because she has decided in advance.

Her line is the tale's hinge: "I will never leave you, and wherever you go, I will follow." That is a declaration of total commitment, and in a different tale it would be admirable. Here it is spoken to someone she has never heard speak, met twice, and knows nothing about, and it is precisely the sentiment that carries her past three chances to turn around.

Two things are being warned against at once, and the corpus marks this as analysis. The first is the obvious one, the attractive stranger from nowhere, which is the same warning as alo-adun-and-the-borrowed-body, where a woman who has refused all local suitors marries a man assembled from borrowed parts. The second is the girl's own certainty. What defeats every warning is not the leopard's cunning but her conviction that following him is love and that love settles the question.

The rescue is worth noting because it is unearned in the ordinary sense. She does not outwit the leopard or reach safety by cleverness. She runs, and a tree takes pity on her and lies down across a river. The corpus notes that this is a different moral economy from the tortoise tales, where outcomes track conduct: here a young woman who has made an unmistakable mistake is saved anyway, by the forest itself, and gets home. The tale is a warning, not a punishment.

Note also what she loses. Nothing, materially: she is exhausted and alive, and the stranger never returns. Compare alo-the-palm-oil-seller-and-the-goblin, where the girl who follows a supernatural stranger down a road, refusing his warnings to turn back, is rewarded rather than hunted. The two tales use the identical opening device, an insistent girl following a non-human being who repeatedly tells her to go back, and reach opposite outcomes. This is worth stating plainly against any reading of the genre as a consistent system of rules, and it belongs with the argument in alo-why-the-tortoise-shell-is-marked about the tradition's tolerance for incompatible tellings.

Ekùn the leopard

The leopard is a standing presence in Yorùbá verbal art, and this compiler was able to source only a small body of narrative in which he is a character rather than a figure of speech. What exists in this section:

• This tale, where Ekùn is a shapeshifter and a predator on women.
• alo-how-leopard-got-his-spots, two competing aetiologies of the leopard's markings, one involving Akiti the hunter and one involving a woman's soapy loofah.
• A supporting appearance in alo-the-tortoise-helps-the-animals, where the leopard offers to kill the water creatures with his claws and fails like everyone else.

This is thinner than the material available for Ìjàpá by a wide margin, and the corpus states plainly that it did not locate a leopard cycle comparable to the tortoise cycle. Whether one exists in the Yorùbá-language collections this compiler could not obtain is unknown.

Variants

No Yorùbá-language version and no second collection of this tale were located. The record consulted is silent on variation.

The corpus notes a structural resemblance to alo-the-palm-oil-seller-and-the-goblin, recorded by a different collector 35 years earlier: a girl follows a non-human stranger who repeatedly warns her to turn back, in what was in both cases a sung exchange. That two independent collectors record the same device is evidence that the following-and-warning song was a real Yorùbá narrative pattern rather than one teller's invention. The corpus asserts the pattern and not a relationship between the two tales, whose outcomes differ completely.

Performance context

Evening telling, treated in yoruba-alo. The tale as it survives is a summary of a performance whose sung sections have been removed, and the corpus notes that its true length in performance would have been considerably greater than the printed page suggests: three songs, one of them a chase, in a text of about eight hundred words.