How the Leopard Got His Spots

In the days when everybody started fair, my dear, the Leopard lived in a place called the High Veldt. Not the Low Veldt, or the Bush Veldt, or the Sour Veldt — but the exclusively bare, hot, shiny High Veldt, where there was sand, and sandy-coloured rock, and exclusively tufts of sandy-yellowish grass.

The Giraffe and the Zebra and the Eland and the Kudu and the Hartebeest lived there; and they were exclusively sandy-yellow-brownish all over. But the Leopard, he was the very sandiest-yellowest-brownest of them all — a greyish-yellowish sort of beast, and he matched the exclusively yellowish-greyish-brownish colour of the High Veldt to a hair.

This was very bad for the Giraffe and the Zebra. For the Leopard would lie down beside a greyish-yellowish stone or clump of grass, and when the Giraffe or the Zebra came by, he would surprise them out of their jumpsome lives.

Also, there was a Hunter (a hunter-man who lived alongside the Leopard on the High Veldt), and he had a bow and arrows. The Hunter and the Leopard hunted together — the Hunter with his bow, the Leopard with his teeth and claws — and between them they made life very tricky indeed for the Giraffe and the Kudu and the Zebra and all the rest.

After a long time, the animals learned to avoid anything that even looked like a Leopard, or anything that looked like a Hunter. And, bit by bit — the Giraffe began it, because his legs were the longest — they all went away from the High Veldt.

They scuttled for days and days and days until they came to a great forest, exclusively full of trees and bushes and stripy, speckly, patchy-blatchy shadows. And there they hid.

And after another long time, what with standing half in shadow and half out, and what with the slippery-slidy shadows of the trees falling on them, the Giraffe grew blotchy, and the Zebra grew stripy, and the Kudu and the Eland grew darker with little wavy lines on their backs like bark on a tree.

So though you could hear them, and though you could smell them, you could very seldom see them. And then only when you knew precisely where to look.

They had a beautiful time in the exclusively speckly-spickly shadows of the forest, while the Leopard and the Hunter ran about the exclusively greyish-yellowish-reddish High Veldt outside, wondering where all their breakfasts and their dinners and their teas had gone.

At last they were so hungry that they ate rats and beetles and rock-rabbits, and got the biggest tummy-ache, both together. Then they met Baviaan — the wise dog-headed Baboon, who is quite the wisest animal in all South Africa.

'Where has all the game gone?' asked the Leopard.

Baviaan winked. He knew.

'Can you tell me the present habitat of the aboriginal Fauna?' asked the Hunter. (That meant the same thing, but the Hunter always used long words.)

Baviaan winked again. He knew.

'The game,' said Baviaan at last, 'has gone into other spots. And my advice to you, Leopard, is to go into other spots as soon as you can.'

The Leopard scratched his ear. 'I went into this spot,' he said. 'And a lot of good it did me.'

'Oh,' said Baviaan, 'not those spots. Spots on your SKIN.'

'What's the use of that?' asked the Leopard.

'Think of Giraffe,' said Baviaan. 'Or if you prefer stripes, think of Zebra. They find their spots and their stripes give them perfect satisfaction.'

'Umm,' said the Leopard. 'I wouldn't want stripes like Zebra. But I could try spots.'

The Hunter thought about it. 'I could help,' he said. He dipped all five of his fingertips into dark paint — a lovely deep working-blackish colour, with a little purple in it and touches of slaty-blue. Then he pressed them, all five at once, all over the Leopard's beautiful yellow coat.

Wherever his five fingers touched, they left five little dark marks, close together. Sometimes the fingers slipped and the marks got a little blurred. But if you look closely at any leopard now, you will see there are always five spots grouped together — from five fat fingertips.

'Now you are a beauty!' said the Hunter. 'You can lie out on the naked rocks and look like a heap of pebbles. You can lie out on a leafy branch and look like sunshine sifting through the leaves. You can lie right across the centre of a forest path and look like nothing in particular at all.'

The Leopard was delighted. Off he went into the shadowy forest, where all his old suppers were hiding.

And that is how, from that day to this, every leopard has been beautifully spotted, and every leopard has lived in the shadowy forests where his beautiful spots hide him perfectly.

(Freely retold for bedtime from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, 1902.)