The Coming of the Jungle Leeches to Kinabatangan

Author: Paulina Toyong

Long, long ago, a man named Kangkaban lived in Kinabatangan with his wife. They wanted to have children very much, but they had been married for many years and had none.

One day, Kangkaban went hunting in the forest. He walked toward a mountain called Runimatap. As he climbed to the top, he found something surprising—a beautiful, healthy baby lying on the ground.

Kangkaban looked at the baby carefully. It seemed real and genuine. He was so happy! He thought, "My wife will be so pleased to see this baby." He looked around to see if anyone was nearby, but nobody was there. So he picked up the baby and carried it home to his wife. She was overjoyed and began to feed the baby with her own milk. They both believed the baby was a gift from God. But they were very wrong.

The Creature Revealed

The baby was not real at all. It did not just drink the mother's milk—it also drank her blood without her knowing. As time went on, the mother felt terrible pain. She tried to pull the baby away, but she could not. Her husband tried too, but nothing worked. He was terrified and did not know what to do.

After many hours, the mother grew paler and weaker because the creature kept drinking her blood. She fell to the ground, crying for help. Her husband felt helpless as the creature continued. Finally, the mother died.

Poor Kangkaban was very sad. In his grief, he took his parang (hunting knife) and cut the baby in half. He was shocked to discover what was inside—the baby was completely filled with jungle leeches! The leeches jumped out and spread quickly to all the villages nearby. Kangkaban was so afraid that he ran away from his home and never came back.

This narrative is part of Sabah Stories, a collection of traditional tales and indigenous folklore originally gathered and rendered into English by scholars attending Saint Francis Xavier High School in Keningau, Sabah, North Borneo, throughout 1968–1973. The text presented here has been entirely rewritten using contemporary language and phrasing whilst preserving all factual content, cultural terminology, place names, character designations, and the substantive narrative elements of the original source. This is not a reproduction of the original material.