by Tamar Myers
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 grass 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 bump 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
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More by Tamar Myers
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Also by Tamar Myers
The Headhunter’s Daughter
The Witch Doctor’s Wife
Den of Antiquities Mysteries
The Glass Is Always Greener
Poison Ivory
Death of a Rug Lord
The Cane Mutiny
Monet Talks
Statue of Limitations
Tiles and Tribulations
Splendor in the Glass
Nightmare in Shining Armor
A Penny Urned
Estate of Mind
Baroque and Desperate
So Faux, So Good
The Ming and I
Gilt by Association
Larceny and Old Lace
Credits
Cover photographs: hut © by Feraru Nicolae/Shutterstock Images; boy © by Nigel Pavitt/Getty Images; leopard © by Jonathan Tichon/Shutterstock Images
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE BOY WHO STOLE THE LEOPARD’S SPOTS. Copyright © 2012 by Tamar Myers. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN: 978-0-06-199773-0
EPub Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780062101457
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