--- title: Just So Stories (Rudyard Kipling), 4: How the Leopard got his Spots, part 1 (the game goes into the forest) — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Just So Stories (Rudyard Kipling), 4: How the Leopard got his Spots, part 1 (the game goes into the forest)», a lesson of the books course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Long ago the Leopard lived on the bare, hot, sandy High Veldt, a --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Books](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/) / Just So Stories (Rudyard Kipling), 4:… # Just So Stories (Rudyard Kipling), 4: How the Leopard got his Spots, part 1 (the game goes into the forest) Lesson 77 of the books course of Mova's primary school: 19 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/0/) — Long ago the Leopard lived on the bare, hot, sandy High Veldt, and he was exactly the same sandy-yellow-brown as the ground, so he could lie by a stone and jump out on the Giraffe, the Zebra and the antelopes before they saw him. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/1/) — A man with a bow and arrows hunted there with him, until the hunted animals had had enough: led by the long-legged Giraffe, they ran away to a great forest full of stripy, speckly shadows. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/2/) — After a long time standing half in shade and half in sun, the Giraffe grew blotchy, the Zebra grew stripy, and the antelopes grew darker, so you could hear them and smell them but hardly ever see them. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/3/) — Back on the empty veldt the hungry Leopard and the hunter eat rats and beetles, get a terrible tummy-ache, and ask the wise Baboon, Baviaan, where all the animals have gone; he only winks and gives them riddles about "spots" and "change". - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/4/) — They find the shadowy forest and can smell and hear Giraffe and Zebra but cannot see them at all, and the part ends with them puzzled in the speckled dark. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/6/) — Kipling keeps saying "'sclusively", his baby-talk for "exclusively", which here means "only, completely". - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/7/) — The Giraffe, the Zebra, the Eland, the Koodoo (kudu) and the Hartebeest lived there and were all "sandy-yellow-brownish all over"; eland, kudu and hartebeest are real African antelopes. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/8/) — The Leopard "matched the 'sclusively yellowish-greyish-brownish colour of the High Veldt to one hair", and would "surprise them out of their jumpsome lives". - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/9/) — The Leopard hunted with a man who had bows and arrows; parts of this story use old words and ideas about people that are racist and wrong, so we do not repeat them, and in these lessons we simply call him "the hunter". - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/10/) — "Bit by bit--the Giraffe began it, because his legs were the longest--they went away from the High Veldt" to a forest full of "stripy, speckly, patchy-blatchy shadows". - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/11/) — There "the Giraffe grew blotchy, and the Zebra grew stripy, and the Eland and the Koodoo grew darker, with little wavy grey lines on their backs like bark on a tree trunk". - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/12/) — The Leopard and the hunter grew so hungry that they "ate rats and beetles and rock-rabbits" and "had the Big Tummy-ache, both together". - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/14/) — The hunter asks "the present habitat of the aboriginal Fauna", which means "where the wild animals of this land live now" ("aboriginal" here = there from the beginning, "fauna" = animals, "flora" = plants); the book says he always used long words because he was a grown-up. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/15/) — Baviaan's riddles: "The game has gone into other spots; and my advice to you, Leopard, is to go into other spots", and "The aboriginal Fauna has joined the aboriginal Flora because it was high time for a change" ("game" = wild animals hunted for food). - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/16/) — The forest is "speckled and sprottled and spottled, dotted and splashed and slashed and hatched and cross-hatched with shadows"; Kipling says "Say that quickly aloud". - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/17/) — The Leopard remembers that "Giraffe is about seventeen feet high" and Zebra "about four and a half feet high" (he knows the Zebra's size well, because he used to hunt him and crunch his marrow-bones); "Fiddle!" is an old word for "Nonsense!". - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/18/) — The hunter says the animals should "show up in this dark place like ripe bananas in a smokehouse", that is, bright yellow things in a dark room. - [19](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/19/) — Real biology: animals do not change colour by standing in shadows; their patterns are passed down from parents, and over a very long time the ones whose colours hid them best survived more often and had more young. - [20](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/77-justso-leopard-spots-1/20/) — Real biology: the "rock-rabbit" is the rock hyrax, a small furry animal of African rocks which, oddly, is a distant relative of the elephant; the Quagga, a half-striped zebra named in the story, died out in 1883. - ← previous: [Just So Stories (Rudyard Kipling), 3: How the Rhinoceros got his Skin](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/76-justso-rhinoceros-skin/) - next →: [Just So Stories (Rudyard Kipling), 4: How the Leopard got his Spots, part 2 (One, two, three, and where's your breakfast?)](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/78-justso-leopard-spots-2/) - ↑ back to [Books](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/books/)