The king's life was so bound up with that of
the bird that whoever should kill the bird would simultaneously kill
the king and succeed to the kingdom. The secret was betrayed by the
queen to her lover, who shot the bird with an arrow and thereby slew
the king and ascended the vacant throne. A tale told by the Ba-Ronga
of South Africa sets forth how the lives of a whole family were
contained in one cat. When a girl of the family, named Titishan,
married a husband, she begged her parents to let her take the
precious cat with her to her new home. But they refused, saying,
"You know that our life is attached to it"; and they offered to give
her an antelope or even an elephant instead of it. But nothing would
satisfy her but the cat. So at last she carried it off with her and
shut it up in a place where nobody saw it; even her husband knew
nothing about it. One day, when she went to work in the fields, the
cat escaped from its place of concealment, entered the hut, put on
the warlike trappings of the husband, and danced and sang.
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