Page:Where Animals Talk (West African folk lore tales).djvu/204

 And, as I am going tomorrow to the swamp for bamboo, you must come only on the second day." Chameleon submissively replied, "Very good."

Chameleon continued coming; and his treatment was just so every time, with excuses.

Leopard, hoping, said to himself, "Perhaps he will die on the way," because he saw him walking so slowly, naka, naka. And Chameleon kept on patiently going back and forth, back and forth.

One night. Leopard and his wife were lying down; whereupon his wife asked him, "What is the reason that you and Yongolokodi have not divided the shares of the herd? Do you think he will die of this weakness?" Leopard answered, "No! it is not weakness, Njambe is the one who created him so; it is his own way of walking."

Finally, Chameleon said to himself, "I must see what Njâ intends to do to me; whether he thinks that he shall eat my share." He went by night and waited outside of Leopard's. Next day, in the morning, as Leopard rose to go out, he found, unexpectedly, as he emerged from the house, Chameleon sitting on the threshold. There was no other deception that Leopard could seek; for, the animals were still in their pens. So, he called his children, and said, "Tie the goats and sheep with cords." So they tied them all. And he and Chameleon divided them. Then this one returned to his place; and that one to his.

A story of the cause of the enmity between chickens and parrots. When a chicken comes near to a parrot, the latter