The Boy Who Cried Wolf

5-7 min read
13 pages

The boy who cried wolf, Aesop's fable to read aloud. Twice he shouts for fun and the village comes running. The third time is not for fun.

There was a boy whose work was to take the village sheep up to the high pasture in the morning and bring them down again at dusk, and to sit with them all the hours in between.

It was good work and he was glad of it for about a week. After that he learned what every shepherd learns, which is that sheep do almost nothing, very slowly, all day long.

He could see the village below him — the roofs, the smoke, the people crossing between the houses — and he could hear them faintly when the wind came the right way, and he was very much alone.

One afternoon, mostly to find out what would happen, he stood up on the rock at the top of the pasture, took a deep breath, and shouted «Wolf! Wolf! There's a wolf in the sheep!»

What happened was that the village came. Men left the field with their hoes still in their hands; a woman came up the path carrying a stick; the baker came in his apron. They ran the whole way up, and it is a steep path.

They found the sheep grazing and the boy sitting on his rock, laughing so hard he could barely speak. «You should have seen yourselves,» he said. «You should have seen the baker.»

They looked at him for a while. Then they went back down, and it took them much longer going down than it had coming up.

Four days later he did it again, because the first time had been the best thing that had happened all month. «Wolf!» he shouted. «Wolf! It's got a lamb!»

Fewer of them came the second time, and they came at a walk, and when they got there nobody laughed at all. The oldest of them said one short thing to him about the sheep not being his, and they went away.

Then, on a still grey afternoon at the end of the week, the sheep at the bottom of the pasture came up the slope all together, quickly, without a sound — and behind them, out of the scrub by the wall, came a wolf.

The boy got up on his rock. He shouted «Wolf!» and his voice went out over the valley exactly as it had the other two times, because a voice cannot tell anybody whether it means it.

In the village they heard him. They looked up at the pasture, and one of them said what they were all thinking, and they went back to what they were doing, and nobody came up the path at all.

He kept shouting for a long while after it had stopped being any use. That evening he brought down what was left of the flock by himself, and the whole way down he was working out what he would say, and there was nothing he could say, because he had already used the words.

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Text source: Fable by Aesop (6th century 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 Boy Who Cried Wolf

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