The clever rabbit

When I was young my mother used to tell me many nice stories. This story has a rabbit in it.

One day two animals, the pig and goat, met a rabbit. And when they saw the rabbit they started to laugh at him.

The rabbit was cross and wanted to stop them laughing at him. When they passed, the rabbit started to call, “Hey you, pig, I want to tell you something very important.”

But the rabbit did not say anything important. All he said was that the sun was very hot.

So the pig went back to the goat, and the goat asked him what the rabbit said. The pig said, “No, the rabbit didn’t say anything.”

“Oh,” said the goat, “You are trying to trick me.” The two animals started fighting.

The rabbit had won.

***

Granny and the jackal

Another story was about an old granny who lived with her daughter and son-in-law. So this story happened in the early years when these people were staying in huts near Ladysmith.

Now every day the daughter and son-in-law went to the fields to plant mealies.

When the son-in-law came back at night he liked to eat amasi from a bowl. Granny would watch the son- in-law because she also liked to eat amasi.

In the day, when the son-in-law was working in the field, Granny would eat his amasi.

She would sit on the chair, it was not really a chair, it was a tree stump, and she would eat and sing happily. When she was finished she took water and poured it into the bowl.

One day the son-in-law came back early from the field. As he walked to the hut, he saw granny eating amasi. He shouted, “Ya, Ya, I caught you. Today is your day. You have been eating my amasi. Then you put water in the bowl. Now I want you to go and fetch cold water from a river. There must be no frogs, no crocodiles and no snakes in the river.”

So granny took a bowl to put the water in.

When she came to the first river she said, “Are there snakes? Are there crocodiles?”

The snakes made their song, “Sssss, we are here.”

Granny went to the other river and the animals answered her again.

Now granny was far away from home and she was very tired. She sat down to have a rest. Just then a rabbit came to her and said, “Who told you to fetch water? You will see the other one, the big animal like a giant is coming.”

Granny started suffering, she was scared of giants. At last she heard a big sound and big footsteps. There was something coming, something speaking in a loud voice.

It was the voice of the giant. “Granny, see who I am. Stand up and come with me.”

The giant took granny to where all the animals were. He said to them, “You must fetch me wood because granny is my meat. She will be a nice meal for me tomorrow.” That night when the animals were sleeping, the jackal came to granny. He said in her ear, “Granny wake up because you are going to die. I will take yon half way to your home.”

Granny and jackal ran and ran.

When jackal came back the wet of the grass was all over him. The wet showed that he had taken granny away. So he put the wet on the rabbit.

When the giant woke up in the morning he said, “Where is granny? Where is my meat?” All the animals said they did not know where granny was.

The giant laughed, “Aha, the one who took granny will be wet.” The lion was not wet, the elephant was not wet. But the rabbit was wet.

The giant started to braai the rabbit.