THE BEAR THAT WAS TRICKED BY THE FOX by

Ion CreangaOnce upon a time, there was a sly fox. She’d been

trying to find food all night and couldn’t get any. At dawn, the fox came out to the side of the road and lay down under a bush, thinking of other ways of getting food. As she was lying there with her head on her front paws, she smelled fish. She raised her head a little and, looking down the road, she saw a cart coming her way.

She instantly got out from under the bush and stretched out in the middle of the road, playing possum. As the cart got closer, the peasant driving it saw the fox and, thinking she was really dead, stopped the oxen. The man came near the fox, looked at her closely and, seeing she was not breathing, said: “How could this fox die here? Wow! What a nice little jacket I’ll make for my wife from the fur of this fox!” Saying that, he grabbed the fox by the scruff of the neck, dragged her to the cart, and then hoisted her onto it, on top of the fish. Then he set off again, eager to get home as soon as possible.

But fox started to push the fish off the cart with her legs. The peasant was prodding, the cart was squeaking on, and the fish was falling off the cart. After she pushed off a lot of fish, she jumped out and hurried to gather the fish off the road. After gathering it in a pile, she took it to her den and started eating it, for she was sooooo veery hungry.

Hardly had she eaten anything when the bear came to visit her. Seeing the feast, he asked for some fish, because he was starving. But she told him she wouldn’t give him any. Instead, she sold him a story about how she had dipped her tail in the pond and gotten all that fish.

He asked the fox to show him how, so she told him: “Go to the pond at the edge of the forest tonight, dip your tail in it and sit without moving until almost dawn; then pull hard towards the shore and you’ll take out plenty of fish, maybe double or triple what I got”. Mind you, it was winter and freezing. Without saying another word, the bear ran to the pond and dipped his whole tail in it!

That night a cold wind started blowing, so cold that even the cinders in the fire would freeze. So the water froze solid too and caught the bear’s tail in. After a while, unable to stand the pain anymore, the bear yanked with all his might. And instead of catching fish, the poor bear was left without a tail! He now started growling in agony and jumping up and down with pain; and angry with the fox for having tricked him, he made for her den to beat the life out of her. But the sly fox knew how to dodge the bear’s anger. She’d got out of her den and gone into a tree hollow nearby; and when she saw the bear coming without a tail, she shouted at him:

“Well, well, my friend! Did the fish eat your tail or were you too greedy and didn’t want to leave any fish in the pond?”When he heard she was taunting him on top of everything else, the bear got even more enraged and dashed towards the tree; but the opening of the hollow was very narrow and there was no way the bear would be able to get in. So he looked for a branch with a curved, pointy end like a hook and started poking inside the den to bring the fox out and give her a thrashing.

But whenever he grabbed on to one of her legs, the fox would shout: “Go on, pull, you fool! You’re pulling the tree so what do I care…” And whenever the hook caught the tree, she would shout: “Ouch, don’t pull, you’re going to yank my leg out!” All his efforts were in vain, he couldn’t get the fox out.

And that’s how the bear was tricked by the fox.