Character guide

Taffy

major

Also known as Yah, Ya

Taffy trails her father Tegumai everywhere, dirty and unspanked, until a broken spear and a stranger's misunderstanding push her to draw pictures that speak. She is impatient with silly beaver sketches but sharp enough to catch the sounds hiding inside words like shu-ya and las. Her playful leap from picture to letter is the hinge on which the whole invention of writing turns.

Painted Jaguar

supporting

Also known as Jaguar, the Jaguar

Painted Jaguar hunts everything he can catch and relies on his mother's tidy instructions for eating hedgehogs and tortoises. When Stickly-Prickly and Slow-Solid swap tricks and then swap shapes, his paw and his pride both take a beating. His baffled return to the same two animals, still nursing his hurt foot, drives the comedy of the armadillo origin.

Pau Amma the Crab

major

Also known as Pau Amma, old Pau Amma

Pau Amma is so vast that his shell spans from Sarawak to Pahang, and he stirs the Sea just to prove he matters. The Eldest Magician strips his shell away, leaving him soft and ashamed, and bargains a new safety into every stone and weed. His wounded pride and stubborn refusal to choose at once keep the tides and the story's central negotiation in motion.

The Elephant's Child

major

Also known as The Elephant ’s Child

He pesters every relative with 'what does the Crocodile have for dinner,' and their spankings only sharpen his appetite for answers. At the great grey-green Limpopo the Crocodile grabs his nose and pulls it into a trunk, with the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake's help. His delight in mud-caps, fly-whisks, and spanking hippopotamuses turns a punishment into the first pachyderm advantage.

Suleiman-bin-Daoud

major

Also known as Daoud, Suleiman, the Most Wise Suleiman-bin-Daoud

Suleiman-bin-Daoud wears a ring that summons Afreets, Djinns, Fairies, and even Azrael, and he can hear what rocks and trees say. His one attempt to show off by feeding all the world's animals ends in shame when a single sea-creature eats the feast in three mouthfuls. Married to nine hundred and ninety-nine wives besides the wise Balkis, he must now navigate a domestic quarrel that only a small stamped butterfly can settle.

Old Man Kangaroo

supporting

Also known as Man, Kangaroo, Man Kangaroo, the Kangaroo, Old Man, the Man

Old Man Kangaroo dances on an Australian outcrop and pesters Little God Nqa, Middle God Nquing, and Big God Nqong to remake him. Nqong grants the wish by loosing Yellow-Dog Dingo, and the chase across the Flinders and the Cinders stretches his legs and adds a pouch. His inordinate pride is both the engine of the tale and the reason he loses his real name, Boomer.

Tegumai Bopsulai

major

Also known as Tegumai, O Babe of Tegumai

Tegumai is a chief of the Tribe of Tegumai, a hunter whose spears break at inconvenient moments and whose patience for hide-hanging is thin. When his daughter Taffy tries to send a picture-letter to her mother, the misunderstanding that follows costs him two soft deerskins in apology and leaves him laughing with her over the mud in a stranger's hair. Their shared delight in turning sounds into marks — la, ya, maru — makes him the story's engine, a father who treats invention as play.

The Stranger-man

supporting

Also known as the Stranger-man, the Stranger

The Stranger-man is a Tewara — not of Tegumai's tribe — who happens to be passing when Taffy needs a messenger, and who accepts the birch-bark drawing in good faith. He arrives panting and polite at the Cave, only to be flattened by six Neolithic ladies who read the picture as a confession of murder. His bewildered endurance of the misunderstanding, and the two deerskins Tegumai later pays him, make him the story's quiet hinge: proof that a message can travel perfectly and still be read entirely wrong.

Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog

supporting

Also known as Stickly-Prickly, Hedgehog, the Hedgehog

Stickly-Prickly Hedgehog lives in the turbid Amazon alongside Slow-and-Solid Tortoise, and together they have worked out that a confused predator is a harmless one. When the Painted Jaguar arrives reciting his mother's tangled instructions, the Hedgehog cheerfully scrambles the words further, offering himself to be 'scooped' and then rolling into a spine-covered ball at the crucial moment. His mischief matters because it shows the story's real game: not who is fastest, but who can keep the other guessing long enough to escape.

Daddy

minor

The narrator's father who tells the stories to Best Beloved.

The Parsee

supporting

Also known as Pestonjee Bomonjee, the Parsee Pestonjee Bomonjee

Pestonjee Bomonjee is a Parsee cast away on a hot island with three cakes and no company, until a Rhinoceros swims over and eats his cake — hat and all — with appalling manners. Rather than rage, the Parsee bakes a second cake laced with stale ship's biscuit, crumbs, and dead locusts, and waits. His patient, almost cheerful revenge gives the story its shape: a small man's slow arithmetic against a large animal's greed, and the reason the Rhinoceros wears his skin buttoned underneath to this day.

The Butterfly

supporting

Also known as Butterfly, the bad little Butterfly, the little Butterfly

The Butterfly is a small, puffed-up creature in Suleiman-bin-Daoud's garden who has promised the King he will not stamp, and has boasted to his wife that he can. His wife, egged on by Balkis, calls his bluff, and the Butterfly finds himself trapped between a broken promise and a lifetime of being laughed at. His predicament is the story's comic pivot: the moment Suleiman stops showing off and does something kind instead, turning a boast into a genuine miracle for the sake of a very small creature.

The Cat

major

Also known as Cat, O Cat

The Cat is the one animal who refuses the Woman's terms outright, declaring himself neither friend nor servant, and instead negotiates a wager: one word of praise earns him the Cave, two the fire, three the milk. He then vanishes into the Wet Wild Woods, kept informed by the Bat, waiting for the Woman to forget. His patient scheming — and the moment he pats the Baby's cheek — makes him the story's most modern figure: a creature who wants the comforts of home without ever admitting he wants them.

The Dog

supporting

Also known as Wild Dog, Dog, Presently the Dog

In the newly made world, the Dog is the first of the Wild Things to approach the Woman's Cave, lured by the smell of roasted mutton and the promise of a warm place by the fire. His bargain sets the pattern that Horse, Cow, and finally Cat will follow, each weighing what the Woman offers against the freedom of the wild. His choice matters because it turns the Cave from a solitary shelter into a household, giving the Woman an ally and the Man a partner in the hunt.

The Whale

supporting

Also known as Whale

The Whale rules the ocean by appetite alone, eating starfish, garfish, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel until only one small 'Stute Fish remains. When that clever fish suggests he try Man, the Whale gulps down a Mariner of infinite-resource-and-sagacity, raft, breeches, suspenders, and all. What follows inside his warm dark cupboards is a contest of wills between a hungry giant and a stubborn castaway, and its outcome reshapes the Whale's throat forever.

The Leopard

supporting

Also known as Leopard

The Leopard and his human companion the Ethiopian once hunted easily across the greyish-yellowish-reddish Veldt, until Giraffe and Zebra slipped into the shadowy forest and vanished from sight. Reduced to eating rats and beetles, the Leopard consults Baviaan the Baboon, who advises him simply to go into other spots. His bewilderment in the dappled forest and his willingness to adapt drive one of Kipling's most playful explanations of how the world came to look the way it does.

The Camel

supporting

Also known as Camel, O Camel

When the world is new-and-all and every animal has a job, the Camel sits in the middle of the Howling Desert chewing milkweed and refusing to trot, fetch, or plough. Horse, Dog, and Ox each appeal to him in turn and each receives the same lazy 'Humph!' which forces them to work double-time. The Djinn in charge of All Deserts takes up their complaint, and his Great Magic turns the Camel's own word against him, making his idleness visible on his back for always.

Wild Horse

minor

Also known as Horse

A wild horse who is tamed by Man in the Cave.

The Rhinoceros

supporting

Also known as Strorks, the Rhinoceros Strorks

In the days when the Rhinoceros's skin fit him tight as a Noah's Ark toy, he charged down from the Uninhabited Interior, upset the Parsee's oil-stove, and spiked the freshly baked cake on his horn. The Parsee, who never ate anything but cake, waited five weeks and then filled the discarded skin with stale crumbs and burned currants while the Rhinoceros bathed. The itching that follows explains both the Rhinoceros's folds and his famously foul disposition, in a tale where petty theft meets perfectly patient revenge.

Balkis

supporting

Also known as Balkis the Most Beautiful, the Wise Balkis of Sheba, the Queen Balkis

Balkis stands behind the camphor-tree among the red lilies, watching her husband Suleiman-bin-Daoud lose his joy to the endless squabbles of his royal wives. When she overhears the Butterfly's Wife fretting about her boastful husband, Balkis whispers clever counsel that turns the little quarrel into a lesson about taking boastful men at their word. Her wisdom is the story's quiet engine: she mends Suleiman's laughter without ever seeming to interfere, and shows that the cleverest magic in the palace may be a wife's patience.

Best Beloved

minor

Also known as O Best Beloved

The child to whom the stories are addressed.

The Djinn

supporting

Also known as Djinn

He presides over the desert realm where the Camel refuses to work, answering the complaining Ox, Dog, and Horse with a plan of his own. His authority is playful yet absolute: he summons a puff of magic and shapes the Humph to punish idleness, then instructs the Camel to hump without ever ceasing. His inventive justice sets the tale's comic machinery in motion and gives the story its most memorable transformation.

Slow-and-Solid

supporting

Also known as Slow-Solid, Slow - and - Solid

He is the Hedgehog's calm ally in the tangled jungle, where the Painted Jaguar hunts by confusing his two prickly prey. While the Hedgehog panics and practices rolling into a ball, Slow-and-Solid supplies the crucial plan: one of them curls up, the other swims, and neither must ever mix the two. His deliberate, unflappable nature balances the Hedgehog's jittery energy and drives the trick that leaves the Jaguar baffled and hungry.

The Eldest Magician

major

Also known as O Eldest Magician

He is the world's first teacher and orderer, assigning each animal its role in the Time of the Very Beginnings, from Elephant to Turtle. When the Sea falls out of rhythm, he traces the mischief to Pau Amma the Crab and confronts him beneath the Wonderful Tree, only to be laughed at and defied. His authority is vast but not absolute, and his patient reckoning with a disobedient creature shapes the tale's central contest between creation and chaos.

Mummy

minor

The narrator's mother who appears in the frame story.

Teshumai Tewindrow

supporting

Also known as Teshumai

She is the mistress of the Neolithic Cave, a woman of swift judgment and quicker temper, who mistakes Taffy's drawn message for evidence that Tegumai has been speared. Her certainty is comic and terrifying: she screams, summons the Neolithic ladies, and has the bewildered Stranger-man sat upon, muddied, and nearly beheaded before the truth arrives. Her misreading of the new art of writing makes her the story's engine of farce and shows how easily a fresh invention can be misunderstood.

Tortoise

minor

Also known as Slow-and-Solid Tortoise, a Tortoise, the Tortoise

A slow tortoise who becomes an armadillo with the hedgehog.

The Crocodile

supporting

He lurks in the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo, promising the curious Elephant's Child a whispered answer about his dinner. His trick is appetite itself: he seizes the little nose and pulls, threshing his tail like an oar, while the Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake pulls back. Though he loses the tug-of-war, his bite permanently reshapes the Elephant's Child, making him the unwitting author of the trunk and the tale's most famous transformation.

Taffimai Metallumai

minor

Also known as Taffimai

Taffy's full name used in the alphabet story.

Ethiopian

supporting

Also known as the Ethiopian

He is the Leopard's human partner, a practical hunter who grows puzzled when the jungle animals vanish into the landscape. Following Baviaan's counsel, he darkens his own skin to blend with the shadows and presses his five fat black fingertips onto the Leopard's coat, inventing the spots. His cheerful ingenuity and willingness to change make him the story's co-author of camouflage, and his contentment with his new look closes the tale on a note of easy satisfaction.

Dingo

minor

Also known as Yellow-Dog Dingo, The Dog

A yellow dog who chases Old Man Kangaroo across Australia.

Mother Jaguar

minor

Also known as Even Painted Jaguar, Mother

The Painted Jaguar's mother who gives him hunting advice.

Baviaan

minor

Also known as the Most Wise Baviaan, Wise Baviaan

A wise baboon who gives advice to the animals.

The Zebra

minor

Also known as Zebra

A zebra who gets stripes in the forest.

Nqong

minor

Also known as big God Nqong, Big God Nqong

A god who sets the kangaroo chase in motion.

Speckly Jaguar

minor

Also known as Jaguar, The Jaguar

The Painted Jaguar's mother who gives him advice.

Kolokolo Bird

minor

A bird who directs the Elephant's Child to the Crocodile.

Pussy

minor

A female cat who negotiates with the Woman in the Cave.

The Bi-Coloured-Python-Rock-Snake

minor

Also known as the Snake

A python who helps the Elephant's Child on his journey.

Child

minor

A generic child mentioned in the stories.

Wild Cow

minor

A wild cow who is tamed by Man in the Cave.

Binkie

minor

The family dog mentioned in the frame story.

Nqa

minor

Also known as Up jumped Nqa, Little God Nqa

A small god who assists the Eldest Magician.

The Giraffe

minor

Also known as Giraffe

A giraffe who gets spots in the forest.

Strorks the Rhinoceros

minor

The rhinoceros's full name after losing his skin.

Kun

minor

A god who appears in the kangaroo story.

The Baby

minor

A human baby in the Cave who plays with the Cat.

Raja Moyang Kaban

minor

A king mentioned in the crab story.

Small Porgies

minor

Fish that the Whale eats before swallowing the mariner.