Before the Great Snake tumbled from the Stars, hunting was the profession of choice. Everybody who had the means sent their sons and daughters to apprentice with the hunters guild. Hunting wasn’t simply venturing into the bush to find food for supper. Their ultimate goal was to penetrate the forest and to return with tales of bravery and unimaginable wealth. The forest was a magnificent equaliser that did not care whether the person venturing into its depths was the son of a king or the daughter of a farmer. Under the canopy where treetops blocked the sky, creatures attacked at will and spirit beings roamed free from the often curious, often judgemental gaze of their human kin. Naturally, hunters were admired for the bravery they showed when they disappeared into the dangerous world that was the forest. Among the guild, only the most skilled thrived. Those that made it back alive, came with bounties, both material and in the form of stories. Children dedicated to the guild started preparing from a young age. They learned how to command the juju of the hunt and how to protect themselves when faced with creatures that were not human.
The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter was such a child. He was from a nameless town and apprenticed for two decades with a nameless hunter before embarking on his first solo adventure—he came back with precious metals and a thrilling story about a village of people whose hair grew to great lengths in the dark of the night and embarked on exploits as the people slept. The Man Who Used to be a Hunter returned to the forest and came back with glittering jewels and stories about rivers that flowed in the sky, crowded with slippery fish that had arms and legs. The Man Who Used to be a Hunter went back into the forest a third time and emerged with the softest furs and a story about a city of diseased elves that made everyone that heard it weep. The Hunter went out and came back. He traded stories of his battles for the admiration of his community time and time again. After fifty-something exploits, he was sick of it all.
It was after eight months in the Impenetrable Forest. The Man Who used to be a Hunter emerged scarred in too many ways to count, stained red from the top of his bushy out-grown coils to the bottom of his feet with the blood of slain imps and goblins. The Hunter lifted his head to the blue skies, the opposite of the stormy atmosphere within the forest and decided that he no longer wanted to be a hunter. It was time to put an end to it all. Back in those days, they used to say that a hunter finds a wife when a hunter is ready to retire. He had to find a woman to take back home first. Then, he would find another profession, maybe palm-wine tapping. The idea had taken root in the back of the Hunter’s mind so when he found his wife, he recognised her immediately.
The Man Who used to be a Hunter was in a market of monsters. Spirits bartered rare items from the Otherworld, gnomes displayed cutlasses of the shiniest metal and mermaids sold raw pearl and corals for next to nothing. And there she was, his wife, sitting amongst six other women, selling her wares at the market. In those days, ladies would go to the market with their friends to sell akara, however we can’t really say what sort of wares this woman was selling because we do not know who her people are. We can, however, say much about her appearance.
Let’s start at her hair. Her hair was long, braided and packed in a tall crest atop her head. It was styled in a manner which drew one’s eyes down the arch of her crown and to her neck and further down her spine till the cloth she tied across her chest put an abrupt stop to one’s voyeuristic view.
Her skin was as dark as rare ebony fruit. If you know your fruit, you know the fruit from the ebony tree is as lovely to look at as it is luscious. While the fruit bruises easily, the Hunter’s wife appeared sturdy. If we’re to talk about her figure, we have to talk about her hips. Poems could be recited on how they were wide and accommodating, how her behind curved in a way that spoke of dancing, in the market square and deep into the night beneath the stars.
This was how beautiful his wife was, and of course, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter was entrapped. They say that there are seven steps to love. Our man, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter, he didn’t start at the first step. He jumped all the way to step six.
Obsession.
When times were not marked by the year, they were marked by events or by whatever name was the most popular. This era was one when all girls born into noble families of repute were called Yọyin. Yọyin could have been a woman who lived true to her name and brought sweetness wherever she went, or she could have been an enterprising businesswoman who made the sweetest wine. We cannot say for sure, but we can assume that the wife the retired hunter found was also called Yọyin. The Hunter didn’t want his Yọyin for one night, or to even glance his way with a smile. He hastily put together a plan of action.
He snuck into the nearest compound, he hid in the bushes waiting for the perfect time to steal from a water pot in order to wash himself. It had to suffice. There was no time to search for a razor with which to shave, or a tailor to provide reams of cloth. Markets only happened so often—every three, five or seven days—and there was no guarantee that his wife would still be there when he returned.
When the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter approached Yọyin, he approached her as a hunter would. Chest out, walking tall, oozing confidence from every pore. Before he left his town upon his first venture into the bush, he had been widely praised as attractive. Of course, each battle and fight chipped away at his beauty—but the Hunter had enough of it that he was not rendered ugly. When he approached Yọyin and pointed at her wares, she quoted the price without looking at him. Anyone observing would conclude that she wasn’t interested in what he had to offer. Yet, she turned her head in a way that displayed the long line of her neck and adjusted her wrapper so that it hung lower exposing more of her cleavage. The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter talked and coaxed and poured sweet words into her ears right there in the marketplace.
Yọyin was the woman who kept him warm through nights spent sleeping upon branches of trees in the forest. He had known her even before he’d met her. She was more beautiful than the most radiant flower. Her laugh was rare and pleasing, it set his desire alight and brought him pleasure inside out. If Yọyin married the Hunter, she would be pampered beyond measure. The Hunter promised to take care of her, to provide for her, to love her even after grey hairs sprouted on her chin.
Such sweetness matched her name, and combined with The Hunter’s rugged charm, this may have been why the gorgeous Yọyin paid him her full attention. Finally, as the sun neared home for the night, Yọyin agreed to his proposal. The hunter had hit his target.
“I will marry you,” she said. “But you must live with me and my sisters.”
Such was tradition and the Hunter eagerly shadowed Yọyin as she packed her wares.
The world was originally water before the gods formed the forest overrun by many spirit-creatures. It was after humans descended from the sky that parts of the forest were beaten back by civilisation creating the ‘Otherworld’. Still, the forest surrounded everything, separating houses, compounds and villages.
After the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter won Yọyin’s heart, they left the market and walked through the edge of the forest to her family home. As the bush cleared to reveal a circle of rectangular huts with thatched roofs, the first thing the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter noticed was commotion.
It was night and under the light of the lamp-posts, he saw two women locked in fierce battle. One held onto the other’s hair while the other beat her attacker back with her hands. A crowd of women stood watching.
“Give me back my hands!”
Those were the words the retired hunter had thought he’d heard but that couldn’t be. This wasn’t the forest of mysteries. Yọyin led him past the crowd, unaffected.
“Should we not stop them?” The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter asked.
“My sisters fight over everything,” she replied.
They walked past huts for sleeping, an outdoor kitchen, and a bathing area marked by the woven mats that covered it on four sides before reaching the hut that was Yọyin’s.
This is where they would live and this was where Yọyin would reveal herself, eventually. Before that, however, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter could say that he enjoyed his wife. He spent his mornings tapping palm-wine as he planned and selling it in the same market where he’d met his wife. At night, he learned the intricacies of Yọyin’s dances and studied every bit of her body as the learned man studies his juju.
So, naturally, he knew when her body changed.
A lesser entranced man would not have noticed that his wife’s neck seemed shorter than it was before.
The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter knew his wife’s neck fit snugly in the cup of his palm. But one day, he touched her there and felt the tight coils of her hair resting against his thumb and forefinger. Yọyin’s neck was two fingers shorter than it should have been. Then, when the Hunter thought of it, her hair wasn’t the same once she’d loosened her crested hair-do. One day, she left for market and returned with her head almost bald, with scraggly patches of matted hair.
The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter did not mind all this initially, because Yọyin’s face was still there and her face was still beautiful.
Months after his marriage, he was home, seated in the inner courtyard, when a strange voice called out in greeting. Yọyin ran out to welcome her guest and The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter paid no attention as both of them disappeared into a private room.
“Sister, I am here to collect my breasts.”
The words sailed from the interior and hit him in the face. Curiosity got the better of him, and the retired hunter crept toward the room where his wife sat with her guest. The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter watched in horror as, in the dark interior of the room, Yọyin plucked first her right breast, then her left breast from her chest and handed it over to the woman that came demanding. When he shouted out in astonishment, the look she shot his way was scathing.
They argued afterwards, but Yọyin offered no explanation.
The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter moved between anger and confusion, and failed to come up with any reasonable questions. What he had witnessed was impossible, his wife was human…wasn’t she?
Yet, a breastless and hairless Yọyin remained beautiful for her face.
Then, it became a pattern.
Each month came a visitor and with each visitor, Yọyin lost a part of her body. By the time she was worn down to just a head on the floor, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter lost all sense of composure. He had to be honest with himself, he was married to a daemon.
This was what they called real entrapment, his life as a hunter would not let him go.
Soon Yọyin was without limbs. It became his duty to go and fetch water from the stream and to prepare dinner for her and sometimes for her sisters, whose bodies also changed with the seasons. When he went to the stream, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter felt Yọyin’s eyes burning into his back. Sometimes, he would look up and think he’d seen her face, her head hanging low from a tree like fruit, still as beautiful as the first day he had met her. Whatever juju he carried was not strong enough to guarantee an escape. Powerful magic would have saved him from this predicament in the first place.
One day, another voice came calling, and this time when the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter went to check, he saw a headless body. Tall and smooth-skinned with lean muscles. The body felt its way along the wall toward Yọyin’s room and this time, Yọyin called for her husband.
The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter stood aside as the headless body lifted his wife’s head from the floor and plucked both eyes from Yọyin’s head.
“Thanks for keeping my head safe for me, Sister,” the stranger said as she departed.
“My husband,” called Yọyin, “put my eyes into the wall just above the entrance. I want to see everything.”
This was the hunter’s chance to flee.
There was nothing left of the woman he had married outside her eyes and her honeyed, disembodied voice. At night when he tried to sleep, her voice reverberated through the house.
“What are you scared of?”
“I knew what you wanted from me from the first day you laid your eyes on me.”
“You don’t remember me, but I remember you.”
But the hunter waited for his chance, and soon it came. One of her sisters came and plucked her eyes from the mud wall.
“I am going to get another body that you will like,” were Yọyin’s parting words. The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter knew he wouldn’t be around to see it.
Leaving the way he came was impossible, as her many sisters lived out front. He ventured out the back carrying an empty water-pot. The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter returned once more to the forest, this time using it a shield as he traced his way home to his nameless village.
Back in his homestead, the Hunter remembered why his first venture into the forest was not his last. He would say it himself, his family was composed of vile vultures. With each expedition into the forest, they attacked his riches like hyenas upon carrion. His siblings nagged. His father complained that his palm-wine calabash was empty. His mother demanded a new set of cooking pots because her old ones had chipped. The Man Who Used to Be a Hunter grumbled as he shared his hunting gains until he was left with nothing. They were greedy, always fighting over something. They were brothers who would kill their own brothers for a mat full of cowrie shells. They were sisters who would poison their nieces and nephews for an inheritance. Naturally, they were not happy when the Hunter returned empty-handed and announced that he was now retired. His family were vultures but they were better than the wife he’d abandoned. These were humans, after all. The Hunter made his bed among those who preyed on him.
In the nameless town, the Hunter spent his days lying on his mud bed in his darkened room. Sometimes, he would attend the meetings that were required of him as a renowned hunter, or sit in the wide courtyard of the palace while their chief celebrated his achievements. He did not tell any stories. The topic of Yọyin was too sore for comfort. The Hunter imagined his audience laughing at him. How could he claim ignorance after marrying a woman who sold her wares in a market where monsters and humans mingled? They’d mock him for refusing to marry a wife from the Otherworld earlier like other hunters did. Both sides of the forest were littered with half-human-spirit offspring. Even the Hunter’s own master, the one who had taught him to survive in the forest, had a string of failed relationships with daemons. Master’s heart had been broken and mashed to pulp like gruel but he continued to pine for the women of the Otherworld like he was under a spell.
Two harvest seasons had passed without Yọyin. She must have moved on like daemon spouses did, always flitting about like mosquitoes. They say that when a hunter is ready to retire, he finds a wife. This hunter, however, was going to retire without one. But society loathed people who remained alone. The Hunter’s family found a new topic with which to torture him.
“It is not right that you are unmarried at your age,” they said. “It is shameful!”
He looked at his fellow hunters who fell into two categories. There were those who would die happily in the thickness of the forest and there were those who had retired, like him. The latter were growing fat, surrounded by their children. They looked happy enough.
So, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter decided to give marriage a second chance with some necessary conditions. Anybody unnaturally beautiful aroused his suspicion. He would marry but he did not care to see any woman’s face. He didn’t care that she was alluring or hideous. Love, lust and all its attendants were not needed. Despite how their relationship ended, Yọyin had consumed all his love. This time around, he would be less superficial. The Hunter now wanted a woman who will take care of him and who will perform her duties as a wife.
His family agreed to his terms and employed a matchmaker to find him the plainest girl possible. True to their word, the matchmaker found a woman from another nameless village on the other side of the forest that would have been undesirable to most men of that era. She was blind.
On his wedding day, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter allowed his family to make a fuss. He couldn’t be more overjoyed when he was first introduced to his wife and saw that they had married him to a blind woman with skin as silky as palm oil. With her eyelids glued shut, her hands reached out to hold him. In that instant, the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter’s skin grew cold, as Yọyin’s voice whispered in his ear.
“I am so happy to be reunited with you, husband. I missed you so much, my Hunter.”
That night Yọyin told him a story about their meeting. The Hunter couldn’t have recognised her but it must have been his thirty-seventh trail in the forest. The Otherworld is filled with a complex set of rules that no human can hope to understand. Take for instance this one;
If a brave hunter is to step over your house on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, he will be your husband.
The woman, or monster, you know as Yọyin was not even in her house when the Man Who Used to Be a Hunter leapt over it. This was during his battle with the giant bird with lightning in its wings and a beak of two metal swords. Yọyin was bartering with the woman who would trade her human body for the antelope one she then occupied. So far away, she felt that her home was disturbed and saw the Hunter as if he appeared next to her in the Market at the End of World. She was formless yet enthralled. A moment before, Yọyin desperately pleaded with the trader to be rid of her antelope form and in the next, she was at her house.
“That is your husband,” the Balance that kept the forest and the rest of the world in order declared.
But, how could her husband have leapt over her home when it hung mid-air? Yọyin’s answer was clear, right in front of her eyes, as she saw the Hunter climb trees and leap from branches locked in a fierce battle. Needless to say, the Hunter did not even notice her. Yet Yọyin observed him and to her delight, her husband was almost perfect in form. As perfect as any human could be. No human had access to the Weavers who were so excellent at their work that the skin they wove bore no marks. When the Weavers wove feathers, the colours could be as brilliant as freshly dyed cloth or as dull as muddy soil.
Humans had little knowledge of the perfection in imperfection and disproportionate, asymmetrical forms. So, in the grander scheme of things, her husband was fine-looking. She especially liked the way his muscles gathered beneath the skin that covered his legs.
“A gift to congratulate you,” Balance interrupted Yọyin’s observation and gave her a pair of eyes, at once whiter than white and darker than black.
Yọyin accepted the gift, but her regard never left her husband, who had now defeated the creature he’d been fighting. It was not a bad match. She would shape herself to be whatever he desired. Not just that, she would be a better form of whatever he had imagined in his head to be irresistible.
So, she started building. Those eyes that were gifted to Yọyin went through four bodies as she exchanged, bartered and bought her way to the perfect form. When her eyes were returned to her, all that was left was to visit the Weavers for the perfect skin. Whatever form her husband desired, Yọyin would take. Time was no consequence to a fated match. He was human and he was sure to die but when he died, Yọyin would capture his essence and shape him into a body that was her preference.
They would live together, Hunter and Yọyin, with and without form…forever.
And this is what we call a happy ending.
