The Fox and the Grapes

2-3 min read
8 pages

The fox and the grapes, Aesop's fable to read aloud. He jumps until he cannot jump any more, and then decides he never wanted them at all.

It was the hottest part of a hot afternoon, and the fox had been walking since the morning, and he was thirsty in the way that stops you thinking about anything else at all.

At the end of a long wall he found a vine, and high up in the vine there were grapes — dark ones, so full that two of them had split, hanging quite still in the light.

He stood underneath them and looked up for a while, working out the distance the way you do when you already know the answer and would very much like a different one.

Then he jumped. He was a good jumper, and he knew it. His nose went up into the leaves and the leaves moved, and the grapes did not move at all.

He backed off, ran at the wall and jumped again, higher this time, and caught a leaf in his teeth on the way down. He spat it out and did not look at it lying there.

He tried from the side. He tried from the flat stone at the foot of the wall, which gave him half a length more and no grapes. He tried once more straight up with everything he had left, and landed badly, and sat down hard in the dust.

For a moment nobody said anything at all, because there was nobody there but him.

Then the fox got up, shook the dust out of his coat, and looked at the grapes one last time. «Sour,» he said out loud, to the empty afternoon. «Anyone can see they're sour.» And he walked away up the path, and he was still just as thirsty as before.

…read the rest in the Marytale app.

Marytale is an app of illustrated bedtime stories to read to your child — a picture on every page, no ads and no internet needed. The bookmark stays where your child fell asleep.

Try it free

Scan with your phone to get Marytale

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.

Where «The Fox and the Grapes» comes from and who wrote it down

The Fox and the Grapes

More stories to read