There was a family that lived in Cholo Village and around them were three neighbouring families only. The family had a father, a mother, and two children, one girl and one boy. They lived a miserable life. They lived in a hut with no door or even a window. They slept on mats, as they did not have money for mattresses or other house materials, such as curtains, chairs, and bedsheets. In the morning the village was quiet. In the afternoon it was noisy with the cries of animals in the bush. In the evening, the animals were quiet as many animals slept. The village smelled of dead animals from the bush.
The two children were unable to attend school and had to stay at home to assist their parents. The boy used to go hunting with his father from morning to evening, walking into the bush. It was near so they they could bring back the killed animals and prepare them at home. They used ropes attached to trees to trap the animals. They also used arrows and knives to kill the animals. When they saw a prey heading to their trap they could hide to see what happened, and also they could hide if they met other dangerous animals that wanted to attack them. The girl remained home with her mother. The family lived in a very happy environment, despite being poor; every evening they gathered firewood and made a fire to sit around and have more stories and laughs together.
One day, when the father went hunting to get food for the family to eat, he unfortunately killed nothing and returned home without anything to eat. The whole family was frustrated and hungry. They had not eaten since the morning. The father was puzzled how to bring the family back to normal. He went to his friend, who was also a hunter, to ask for something thing to eat. The friend shared a small part of a deer that he killed that day, and the father took the meat to his family. They were very happy. They ate and slept well, waiting for the next day.
The father awoke early the next morning, as was his custom, and again he went hunting in the bush. He was not accompanied by his son that day because the boy slept late, and because it was cloudy and windy. It was unusually noisy in the bush when the father entered. He recalled that when a lion gives birth all the animals show respect and no one is allowed to move. The animals show respect for him as the king of the jungle. The father didn’t want to go back home without any meat because everyone in the family took him as the family provider. He had no choice but to continue hunting. When the father took five steps ahead, a lion just missed swiping his face off. The father was very afraid and he started shivering. He thought again of going back home but he remembered for a second time that the family was waiting for him to bring food to them. He continued stepping ahead and looking for food.
He searched hard and killed a small lion, but just as he turned back to start his journey home a group of lions appeared, very angry and mourning for their lost one. The lions gathered around the hunter and killed him.
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At sunset, the family of the hunter, the mother and the two children, settled around the fire, waiting for their father to come back and bring them food. They waited, but to no avail. They decided to eat fruit they had picked from a nearby garden. They slept with the hope that the father might come later in the night. The two children slept, but the mother could not; she was concerned about her husband’s delayed arrival, and what he was doing. Very early in the morning, the mother woke the kids up and asked them to go look for their father in the bush. They first went to his friend the hunter to ask about their father, but the friend said he knew nothing and advised them to go look for him in the bush, although it was very dangerous and might cost them their lives.
They started their journey in the bush looking for their father. The bush was still quiet, so soon after the celebration of the new lion’s birth. Exactly where their father was eaten by lions, they found some bones that they concluded were their father’s. The two kids cried and the young boy said they should go cry at home, to save their lives as well. Before returning, they collected the bones and brought them home to bury. Their mother cried too.
The three neighboring families around them came and comforted them for their loss. Three months later, the mother died of depression due to the death of her husband. The two kids cried over the loss of their parents, as they were now orphans with no relatives to take care of them. The boy was under great stress and he remembered what his father told him—that he should work hard to be like him. The young boy and his sister came up with the idea of going hunting and killing the majority of the animals in the bush.
The young boy taught his sister all the strategies to become a strong hunter. They started hunting animals in the bush every day, while also learning other tactics from their father’s friend, the other hunter. As the days went by, the kids became very strong hunters. They started killing most of the animals in the bush, using the energy of their bitterness at losing their parents. They continued their hunting until they had killed most of the lions in the bush.
Soon the two kids went back into the bush to hunt. They encountered the same situation as their father: the lions had given birth again. Being kids, they did not understand anything. They set their traps and were ready to start hunting. Soon they came across a group of lions heading to the celebration of the lion’s birth. The lions threw themselves at the kids and killed the two of them. Now the whole family was dead because the kids tried to take revenge for their father. If they had left it all alone this would not have happened to them.
28 April, 2023
