The Eloko: The Bell-Voiced Dwarves Who Guard the Forest's Fruit
The Nkundo and Mongo peoples of the Congo rainforest — the vast equatorial forest of the Congo basin — tell of a being that guards the deep forest and its riches, and that hunts the human beings who come into it, with a weapon this chronicle has met in many forms but never quite this one: a voice like a little bell . The eloko (plural biloko ) is a dwarf of the deep forest: small, and hideous — the accounts give it grass or leaves for its clothing and its very body-hair, so that it is grown over with vegetation like a living stump; long claws; a body wasted to almost nothing; and, most terribly, a mouth that can open enormously wide, lined with teeth, that can swallow a human being whole. It is the vengeful spirit, in some tellings, of the dead — of ancestors who guard the forest, or of the restless dead who have taken to the deep woods — and it dwells in the hollow trees and the densest, oldest, most forbidding parts of the forest, the parts where the great game and the finest fruits...