The Four Friends

6-8 min read
16 pages

The four friends, a Panchatantra tale to read aloud. A crow, a mouse, a tortoise and a deer, and the net that none of them could open alone.

By a lake in a forest there lived four friends, which is an unusual number for animals of four different kinds: a crow, a mouse, a tortoise and a deer.

The crow could see a long way and get there quickly. The mouse could bite through anything. The tortoise was patient and could carry weight. The deer was fast.

They met every evening at the same place on the shore and told each other what they had seen that day, and that was the whole of their arrangement.

One evening the deer did not come.

The crow went up and found him from the air: caught in a hunter's net at the far side of the forest, with the cords round his legs and the hunter not yet back.

The crow came down and told the mouse. The mouse said: «Carry me there. I can cut it, but I cannot fly and I cannot run that far before morning.»

So the crow took the mouse on his back — which neither of them enjoyed — and set him down beside the net.

The mouse began to bite. There were a great many cords and the hunter's rope was thick, and he worked through the afternoon with his jaw aching.

And while he worked, the tortoise arrived. He had set out as soon as he heard and had been walking ever since, and nobody had asked him to come at all.

«You should not be here,» said the crow. «You cannot run. If the hunter comes, we three can get away and you cannot.»

«I know,» said the tortoise, and sat down to wait with them.

The last cord went just as the hunter came through the trees. The deer got up and ran. The crow went straight up. The mouse went into a hole.

The tortoise was still on the path.

The hunter had lost a deer and he was not going home with nothing, so he put the tortoise in a bag and hung it from his belt.

Then the deer came out of the trees ahead of him and lay down on the path with his legs stretched out and his tongue out, as though he had run himself to death. The hunter dropped the bag and went towards him — and the crow came down onto the deer's head and began to peck, to make it look right.

While the hunter was working out his luck, the mouse cut the bag open, and the tortoise went into the water. The deer got up when the hunter was three steps away and was gone before he had finished turning round. The four of them met that evening at the usual place on the shore.

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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.

Want to know where these stories come from? The articles are here

The Four Friends

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