The Hare and the Tortoise

4-6 min read
13 pages

The hare and the tortoise, Aesop's fable to read aloud. He is faster and he knows it — and that turns out to be the whole problem.

There was a hare in the meadow who could not keep still. He ran because running was the thing he did best, and he liked everyone to see him do it.

One morning he came past the pond, where a tortoise was crossing the path. She was crossing it the way tortoises do, which is to say that she had been crossing it for some time already, and was not yet halfway.

«You'll be there all day,» said the hare. «Watch this.» He ran to the willow at the far hedge and back before she had reached the middle of the path, and he was not even breathing hard.

The tortoise looked at him for a moment with her small dark eye. «Let's race, then,» she said. «To the old oak at the end of the field.»

The hare laughed so hard that he had to sit down in the grass. «To the oak? You?» he said. «All right. I'll race you to the oak.»

Word went round the meadow, because a race between a hare and a tortoise is not a thing you see twice in a life. The badger came, and the field mice, and two crows who sat on the fence to get a better view. The badger drew a line in the dust with his paw.

They started together. That is to say the hare started, and the tortoise also started, and by the time she had taken four steps he was already a field away and going through the gap in the hedge.

He stopped at the top of the slope and looked back. She was a small dark shape near the line, moving so slowly that if you watched her you could not actually see her move at all.

«There's no hurry in this,» he said to himself. The slope had a patch of clover on it, and the clover was warm, and it smelled of the whole summer at once. He had run a long way that morning. He lay down in it, meaning to rest for a minute, and his eyes closed.

The tortoise came past the slope a long while later. She did not look at the clover, or at the hare asleep in the middle of it with one ear folded over. She looked at the oak, because the oak was the thing she was walking to, and she kept walking.

She passed the ditch, which took her a long time, and then the loose stones, which took her longer. The sun moved across the sky above her. The shadow of the oak swung round and grew long across the grass, and she was still walking.

The hare woke because the badger was shouting. He was on his feet before he was properly awake, and then he ran — faster than he had ever run, faster than anything in that meadow had ever run, flat out with his ears back and the ground going by underneath him. He was magnificent. He was also too late.

The tortoise put her front foot against the trunk of the oak. «You run beautifully,» she said, when he arrived a moment behind her. «You only stopped.»

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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.

Where «The Hare and the Tortoise» comes from and who wrote it down

The Hare and the Tortoise

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