The Leopard-Man
A cautionary tale in which a maiden follows a silent handsome stranger into the forest despite three warnings, and he turns out to be a leopard who hunts her back to the village.
Collector
No collector is named in the source consulted.
How it was performed
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.
The tale in brief
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. 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 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. 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. When the stranger looked back and saw her coming behind him, he stopped and begged her to return home. 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. 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. 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. But fear gave such speed to her feet that he could not overtake her. 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.
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.