Reading Notes: African Stories from Lang's Fairy Books, Part A
The story in the African Stories from Lang's Fairy Books unit that I've chosen to focus my reading notes on is "Jackal and Spring".
The story begins with a dilemma presented to the animals: all the streams have run dry. They searched and searched until they found a spring, but the spring was a bit small and needed to be dug deeper to order to be sustainable. All of the animals agreed to work together to dig the spring, except the lazy jackal. When they finish digging, they devised a plan to have the rabbit guard the spring from the jackal because he didn't help dig the spring, so he shouldn't be able to drink from it.
When the rabbit was alone on spring watch, he allowed himself to be tricked by the jackal, who tricked him into tying himself up by bribing him with honeycomb. Once he did so, the jackal ran to the spring and drank freely.
The council of animals finds him and decides to put a new animal in charge of guarding the spring, the little hare. Except the jackal used the same trick on the little hare, honeycomb and all, and the end result was the same. The new animal picked by the council to guard the spring was the tortoise.
When the tortoise was left alone guarding the spring, the jackal came to persuade him, except the tortoise paid no attention to the jackal, completely ignoring him. The jackal decided he would just kick him and go to the spring, but when he tried to execute this plan, the tortoise caught him by the leg with a strong grip. The jackal cried out that he would break his leg, the tortoise's grip only tightened. He tried to bribe him with the smell of the honeycomb but the tortoise just looked away so he couldn't smell it.
His grip held until the other animals got back, and when the jackal saw them, he tugged his leg away from the tortoise and took off. The other animals applauded the tortoise for his bravery, grateful that they can now drink from their spring peacefully without having to worry about the thieving jackal.
I liked this story because it was a fun spin on the classic tale that I grew up hearing: "The Tortoise and the Hare," with a trickster variation. And jackals are similar to foxes, which is the original trickster. It's interesting to see all of these elements that I am familiar with due to my exposure to western folktales represented in other cultural folktales.
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