The lion and the hare
Reading time aloud: about four minutes.
The one every child asks for twice, because the ending is so satisfying.
A lion lived in a forest and killed far more than he could eat. He killed when he was hungry and he killed when he was bored, and the animals could not sleep for fear of him.
At last they went to him together. "Great king," they said, "if you go on like this there will be nothing left, and then what will you eat? Stay here. Every day we will send one animal to you. You will never have to hunt again."
The lion, who was lazy as well as cruel, agreed.
So each day a lot was drawn, and each day one animal walked to the lion's cave and did not come back. And one day the lot fell on a small hare.
The hare walked very slowly. He arrived late in the afternoon, when the lion had been hungry for hours and was thrashing his tail.
"You are late," said the lion, "and you are small."
"Great king," said the hare, "I am so sorry. There were six of us sent for your dinner. But on the way another lion came out and took the other five. He said he was king of this forest, and that you were nothing."
The lion stood up. "Another lion? Show me."
The hare led him a long way, and stopped at an old stone well. "He lives down there," he whispered. "But be careful, king. He is very fierce."
The lion put his head over the edge and looked down into the still black water, and a lion looked back up at him.
He roared. The lion in the well roared exactly as loud, at exactly the same moment.
He did not stop to think about that. He jumped.
And the hare went home, and the forest slept that night.
Strength has an obvious weakness: it never has to think, so it stops. The hare wins by being small enough to have needed cleverness all his life. Worth saying to a child at the end — the lion isn't defeated by the well, he's defeated by his own roar coming back.
The animals' bargain at the start varies — in some tellings the lion demands it, in others they offer it, which changes the story's politics rather a lot. The hare is sometimes a rabbit, sometimes a jackal, and in Buddhist versions the moral is about anger rather than cleverness.
Last updated: 2026-08-11
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