The Blue Jackal

4-6 min read
12 pages

The blue jackal, a Panchatantra tale to read aloud. He falls into a vat of dye and everyone in the forest decides he must be a king.

A jackal who lived on the edge of a town went in one night looking for something to eat, and the dogs of that town came after him.

He ran down one lane and up another with the whole pack behind him, and in the dark he went straight over the wall of a dyer's yard and into a vat.

It was a vat of indigo. He climbed out of it the colour of a monsoon sky, and the dogs, arriving at the wall, looked at what came over it and decided not to.

In the forest the next morning nobody knew what he was. A blue animal, the shape of a jackal, walking out of the mist.

The deer stopped eating. The boar backed into a thicket. The tigers, who had never been frightened of anything, stood very still.

The jackal saw all this happening and understood it at once. «I have been sent,» he said. «You may call me the King of the Forest.»

And they did. He was given the best of everything. The tigers hunted for him, the deer carried messages, the boars kept the ground clear where he liked to sleep, and he had a lion on either side of him wherever he went.

He was careful too. He sent the other jackals away — all of them, to the far end of the forest — because they were the only animals who might look at him twice.

It lasted for months. Then one evening, a long way off, the jackals he had banished began to howl, the way jackals do at dusk, all together.

The King of the Forest stood up. He did not decide to do anything. Something older than deciding got up inside him, and his head went back, and he howled with them.

Every animal in that clearing turned round and looked at him.

The tigers understood first. What happened next was quick, and in the morning the forest arranged itself as it had been before, and nobody ever mentioned the blue king again.

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Text source: From the Panchatantra, the Sanskrit collection of animal fables compiled around 300 BC. Public domain. The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

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The Blue Jackal

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