Legends

  Sample Stories

How People Stole Fire

A long, long time ago, there was a young man out hunting. Finally he got an antelope, but he was lost in the forest and didn't know the way home.

At last he saw a camp, but not a human camp. It was a chimpanzee camp. He asked the chimpanzees if he could stay. The chimpanzees answered him that he could stay and they also told him that they would show him the way home to his own camp. They sat down by the fire and cooked their meat. The young hunter thought the fire was a piece of the sun, because this was the first time he'd seen fire.

The next day the chimpanzees brought him home. The whole day he thought about the fire, because he wanted to show his own family how to make it, feed it and how to cook meat on it. So he went back to the chimps.

They were happy to see him again. This time he watched how they fed the fire and cooked on it very carefully. When he came back to his own camp he knew how to feed the fire and how to cook the meat, but he didn't know how to start it.

So for the second time he went back to the chimps' camp. This time he had long bark clothes on, because he thought that the chimps didn't want to tell him the secret of the fire, so he'd decided he was going to steal the fire. So he sat down by the fire so that his bark clothes began to burn. Then he ran away to his own camp. The chimps called to the other chimps that they had to look for their friend because they didnÕt want the fire to hurt him.

When they found him, he was teaching his family how to feed the fire and how to cook meat. They chimps got so disappointed that they decided never to be friends with a human again.