The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

6-8 min read
13 pages

The wolf in sheep's clothing, Aesop's fable to read aloud. The fleece changes what the shepherd sees, and nothing else about him at all.

There was a wolf who had been hungry for a long time, and the reason he was hungry was the shepherd, who counted his sheep twice a day and kept two dogs and slept where he could see the gate.

The wolf had tried the fence and he had tried the gate and he had tried simply waiting, and none of it had come to anything except a bitten shoulder that still hurt when it rained.

Then one evening, in the bushes by the stream, he found an old fleece that somebody had thrown away after the shearing — dirty and torn, but a whole sheep's worth of wool.

He stood and looked at it for a long time. Then he pulled it over his back and got his head down through the neck of it, and walked a few steps to see how it went.

In the water of the stream he looked at himself. From the side, in poor light, at a distance, with his head low — from the side, in poor light, at a distance, he was a sheep.

At dusk, when the flock came up the hill towards the fold, he came out of the bushes at the back of them and walked in among them, keeping his head down and his feet quiet.

The shepherd counted them through the gate. He counted one more than he had put out that morning, and he thought: the black ewe has had her lamb early, and I will look at her in the light. And he shut the gate and went to bed.

So the wolf was inside. He lay down in the straw at the far wall with the fleece over him and waited for the sounds to settle, and he thought about how simple it had turned out to be in the end.

But a fleece is not a sheep. It does not tell you to sleep when the flock sleeps, or to lie still, or which way to face. And a wolf who has been hungry for a long time cannot lie in the dark among sheep and keep on doing nothing.

Somewhere near the middle of the night he got up. The straw moved. A ewe woke and stood, and then another, and in a moment the whole fold was on its feet and pushing towards the corners, and making the noise that sheep make when they are certain.

The dogs came first and the shepherd came behind them with a lamp. He held it up over the hurdles and looked at his sheep all crowded into the two far corners, and then at the one animal standing by itself in the middle of the empty floor.

In the lamplight, close to, with its head up, it was not a sheep at all. It had never been a sheep. It had only been a sheep from the side, in poor light, at a distance.

The fleece did exactly what the wolf had asked of it, right up to the moment it mattered, and then it did nothing whatever, because it had never had anything to do with what he was.

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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 Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

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