A community of mice lived happily in the walls of a house with a perfect sized hole in the corner of the kitchen under the cupboard. The hole allowed the mice to sneak out and grab food whenever no one was around. The community began to grow too large and was eager to come out more often to gather enough food for everyone. One of the mice who had been starving for days could not wait any longer and ran out without checking to see if the coast was clear but unfortunately ran into the mom as she was getting ready to prepare breakfast. She screamed and the mouse ran with fright back into the hole.
The next day, the hole had been covered by the husband and the mice could no longer sneak into the house for food. The neighbor’s cat next door lingered on the fence and saw the mice dreadfully leave the house looking for a new place to stay. The cat thought about attacking the mice by sneaking up on them but the cat could only gain at most two mice by surprise which would not satisfy his appetite. He quickly devised a plan and hoped his acting would be up to par. The cat exclaimed, “I know where you can have an endless source of food if you will let me take you there.” The mice looked at each other skeptical of the cat’s offer. One mouse replied, “How can we trust a cat when we have been hunted by cats our whole lives?” The cat responded, “Well if you don’t want the food, I am fine with eating it all myself.” The mice were desperate for food and made a plan to let the cat take one mouse and show that mouse the place with a so called “endless” food source so that the mouse could come back and tell the community if the cat was lying or not. The cat let the mouse climb on his back and then the cat swiftly snuck the mouse over the fence and into his owner’s house. The cat fed the mouse an abundance of food and then took the mouse back to the community. The mouse went on and on about how content he was from all of the food he had and how there was so much food left waiting to be eaten. The mice all fought to be the next one to go with the cat to the neighbor’s house. The cat took each mouse one by one and ate them as soon as he was out of sight of the other mice. Eventually there were no more mice to eat and the cat grew hungry again.
The cat saw out of the corner of his eye a bird on a nearby bench. He made the same offer to the bird as he did to the mice. The bird was smarter than the whole community combined. The bird agreed but on one condition, that the cat let the bird stand on the cat’s head so that the bird could see where they were going. The cat went over the fence and into the house where a tall stack of small bones were piled. The cat thought he was clever and could eat the bird as he did with all of the other mice but before he could capture the bird, the bird in the perfect position pecked at both of his eyes and flew away. The cat was not able to kill another mouse again.
Bibliography. "The Cunning Crane and the Crab" from The Giant Crab, and Other Tales from Old India by W. H. D. Rouse with illustrations by W. Robinson, web source
Author's note: The original story is about a crane that convinces fish who are living in a dried out pond to come to a fresh new pond with abundant resources on the other side but at the cost of their lives as the crane eats them one by one while carrying them in his beak over to the other side. However, a crab outsmarts the crane and convinces the crane to allow the crab to hold onto the crane's neck. The crane tries to trick the crab like the others but the crab had the upper hand and clipped the crane's head off. I replaced the crane, fish, and crab with a cat, mice, and bird respectively. I switched out the characters to provide another scenario where a trickster could get tricked because those are my favorite types of stories so I didn't want to change the actual plot of the story.
