Anansi and the Sky-Blue Story Box (part 2)

The first item was easy. Anansi returned to his home and dug a large, deep pit next to his front door, just off the path. He covered it with palms and long grasses until the hole looked the same as the ground around it. Then he invited his friend Leopard over for a drink.

Leopard and Anansi drank and talked and laughed and drank some more far into the night. When at last Leopard staggered back to his home, he was walking so crookedly that he probably wouldn’t have been able to avoid the pit even if he had seen it. As it was, he crashed so hard to the bottom of the hole that all his spots were knocked off.  In his state, though, all he felt was a mild bump.

“Anansi,” he slurred, “I think I’ve fallen down.”

“Poor Leopard,” Anansi said. He was just as drunk as Leopard, but at least he knew the hole was there. “I’ll help you up.” After a great deal of heaving and tripping and pulling and stumbling, Leopard was out of the hole and safely on his way back to his bed.

The next morning, nursing a terrible hangover and muttering that the sun was too bright, Anansi scrambled down the hole and collected Leopard’s spots. He stored them all carefully in a leather purse. Then he sat heavily and sighed.

“Now, how am I going to get a hive of hornets?” he mused aloud.

“Simple,” his wife said. “All you need is two gourds and…”

“Yes, yes, I see your plan,” Anansi interrupted, holding a hand to his head. “There’s no need to shout.”

Later that afternoon when he was feeling better, Anansi took a dried hollowed gourd with a cork and a leaky gourd full of water and went to the hornets’ buzzing, swarming hive. He tied the leaking gourd above the hornets’ nest where it was hidden by some leaves. Surreptitiously keeping hold of one end of the string he’d used to tie it, Anansi walked casually past the nest. A few paces past it, he stopped and turned as if in surprise.

“Why my friend Hornet,” said Anansi in his fake surprise, “Why are you still in your summer home? Don’t you know that the rainy season has come early? You will no longer be able to live in your paper hive.” And indeed, all the while as he was speaking Anansi had been pulling the string, jigging the hidden gourd above so that large drops of water had begun to come pouring down on the fragile paper.

“Oh no,” cried the hornets in dismay, thoroughly convinced by Anansi that the rainy season was here. “What will we do?”

“Here, I have this empty dry gourd,” Anansi said, holding it up. “Fly into here, and I will keep you safe from the water.”

Grateful, all the hornets swarmed into the gourd. Anansi stopped up the opening with the cork and returned home. He placed the gourd next to the leather pouch with all of Leopard’s spots. Then he sat down to think.

“Now to catch a rainbow python,” he said to himself.