The Hare Who Heard a Sound

4-6 min read
13 pages

The hare who heard a sound, a Jataka tale to read aloud. A mango falls behind him, and within an hour the whole forest is running.

A hare was lying under a young mango tree one afternoon, half asleep, thinking about nothing in particular.

Behind him a ripe mango fell out of the tree onto a dry palm leaf, and it made a noise like something very large cracking.

The hare did not look round. He got up and ran.

Another hare saw him going and shouted, «What is it?» «The earth is breaking up!» said the first hare, and did not stop, and so the second hare ran too.

By the end of the field there were a hundred hares running. By the edge of the forest there were deer with them, and boar, and buffalo.

The rhinoceros joined, and then the tigers, and then the elephants, and the whole forest was going in one direction with the ground shaking under it — which everybody took as proof.

A lion on a hill above the valley saw it coming and could not understand it, because there was no fire and no flood and nothing behind them at all.

He came down and got in front of them and roared, which stopped everything.

«Who saw the earth break up?» he said. The elephants said the tigers had told them. The tigers said the buffalo. The buffalo said the deer, and the deer said the hares, and the hares, one after another, pointed backwards until there was one hare left at the end of the line.

«I heard it,» said the hare. «Behind me. A great crack, where the earth came apart.»

«Show me,» said the lion. The hare did not want to go. The lion carried him.

Under the young mango tree there was a dry palm leaf with a mango lying on it, and nothing else whatever.

The lion took him back and said one sentence to the whole assembled forest, and then everybody went home, in a good deal less of a hurry than they had come.

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Text source: From the Jataka tales, the Indian collection of birth stories written down in Pali from 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 Hare Who Heard a Sound

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