The Girl Who Married A Lion. Alexander McCall Smith
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to. He kept the words in his mind, as he planned to visit the girl that night to make sure that she was safe and that the rock was acting as a strong enough door.
That evening, when he returned, it was already dark. As he approached the cave, he sang the song which she had taught him:
There is a rock here and the cave is dark;
Open the cave, my sister, and let me in.
When the girl heard this song, she knew straight away that her brother was outside. She pushed at the rock and it rolled to one side. Her brother was pleased to see that the song worked and that his sister was safe. He gave her the food that he had brought her and then said goodbye.
“Make sure that you roll the rock back once I am outside,” he said.
“I shall always remember that,” his sister replied. “A girl could not live alone in a cave like this unless she had a rock for protection.”
The brother came the next day, and the day after that. On his third visit there was something that worried him. Not far from the cave he noticed that there were footprints on the ground and that lying nearby there was a bone which had been gnawed. He picked up the bone and looked at it. Whoever had eaten it must have had a great appetite, for his teeth had cut right into the bone to extract its goodness. The footprints were large, too, and the sight of them made the brother feel uneasy.
He arrived at the front of the cave and began to sing his song. As he did so, he had a strange feeling – as if there was somebody watching him. He turned round, but all that he saw was the wind moving through the dry brown grass and a rain bird circling in the sky. He finished the song, and the girl rolled back the rock to let him into the cave.
“I would like you to come and live with your family again,” he said to the girl. “We are sad that you are not with us.”
“I am sorry too,” she replied. “And yet I love this place too much to leave it. Perhaps one day my father will decide to come back here.”
The boy shook his head. He knew that his father would never come back now that he had found that he liked the other place to which he had gone. Soon the memory of this place would fade and the family would talk no more about it.
The boy ate some food with his sister and then left. As he walked away, he again felt that there was somebody watching him, but again he saw nothing but the wind and a small snake that moved like a dark arrow through the dry leaves on the ground.
The man who had driven the family away from that place was a cannibal. Now he had heard the boy singing his special song to his sister in the cave and he had remembered the words. Under a large tree not far away, he practiced the song which the boy sang. His voice, though, was too rough, and he realized that no girl would be fooled into believing that it was the voice of her young brother.
The cannibal had a way to deal with this. He made a fire, and on the fire he put a number of stones. Then, when these stones were red hot, he put them in his mouth and let them lie against that part of his throat that made the sound. After a few minutes he spat out the stones and tried the song again. The stones had done what he had hoped they would do and his voice was now as soft as the boy’s.
Inside the cave, the girl had settled herself to sleep on her sleeping mat when she heard her brother singing outside. It surprised her that he should come back so soon, but then she remembered that he had left a calabash in the cave and might be returning to collect it.
“I am coming, my brother,” the girl sang out. “The rock will move back and let you in.”
By the time that the mouth of the cave was half open, the girl realized that it was not her brother who was standing outside. When she saw the cannibal, her heart gave a leap of fear and she struggled to roll the rock back. The cannibal, though, was too quick and had seized her before she could seal off the cave mouth.
The girl screamed as the cannibal lifted her off the ground and began to tie her arms and legs with a rope he had with him. Then, when she was firmly tied up, he went to a place nearby and began to make a fire so that he could cook the girl and eat her. As he made the fire, he sang a special song, of the sort that cannibals sing, in which he told of how a poor hungry cannibal had found a fat girl in a cave.
The girl wept with sorrow at the thought of what had happened to her. She wept for her father and mother, whom she would never see again, and she wept for her stupidity in trying to stay in so dangerous a place. Through her tears, she sang a sad song, about how a girl who lived in a cave was captured by a wicked cannibal.
The boy had felt so uneasy on his way home that he had come back to the cave. Now he was hiding in the grass, listening to the sad song of his sister. When he saw the cannibal bending over his fire, the boy rushed forward and pushed him into the flames. The many skins which the cannibal was wearing soon caught fire and he ran wildly away, letting out strange cries as he ran.
The boy untied his sister and then led her back to their father’s new place. That night, the girl told her father of what had happened. He was worried at the thought of the narrow escape that she had had, but he was relieved that she was now safe. He was glad, too, to hear that the cannibal had run away, as this meant that the family could now return to that place where they had been so happy, and where the girl knew they would be happy once again.
“This is unfair,” the hare said to himself. “I could do with the food that everybody gives the lion.”
Calling on the lion one day, the hare told him that he was very skilled at getting lice out of lion tails.
“I can tell that you have lice in your tail,” the hare said. “Can you not feel them itching?”
The lion thought for a moment. Now that the hare had mentioned it, he was sure that he could feel an itching in his tail.
“Remove the lice from my tail,” he roared at the hare. “Do it right now!”
The hare smiled and said that he would set to work straight away. Quickly he went to the back of the lion and laid out his great tail on the floor. Then, taking a handful of long nails from a bag that he had with him, he hammered a nail through the lion’s tail and into the floor.
The lion called out in pain and told the hare to be more careful.
“I’m sorry,” said the hare. “These are very large lice. They are angry that I am catching them and that is why they are biting you so hard. You’ll just have to put up with it until I’m finished.”
The lion grunted and lay still while the hare pretended to search for another louse. When he was ready, he took out another long nail and quickly hammered it through the lion’s tail. This time the lion roared even louder.
“That was a very large louse,” the hare said. “But don’t worry, I have taken him off.”
“How many more are there?” asked the lion, his eyes watering with pain.
“Three,” replied the hare. “And all of them seem to be very large.”
Each of the last three lice seemed more and more painful to the lion, and he howled more loudly each time the hare drove another nail into the floor. Finally the hare was finished and he came round to face the lion. Looking him directly in the eye – in a way in which no other animal would dare – the hare calmly walked over to the place where the lion kept his food and began to help himself.
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