More animal tales.
From taking Mythology and Folklore, I have become a big fan of the stories with the animal lessons in them, mainly the Jataka Anthology stories. I chose to read
The Giant Crab and Other Tales from Old India by W. H. D. Rouse. The first part of the reading was a collection of twelve different stories. However, I only found a few that I liked and could recreate. This first story idea I came up with was creating a prequel tale to
The Giant Crab. In the story, the giant crab kills any animal that comes into the water to drink and eats them (which is how he got so big). In the end, a husband and wife elephant couple trick the crab and crush him to death. I think I could create a story about how the crab became so big and meant to other animals because they picked on him for his small size. Another story that I could possible recreates only came from one line in the story
The Crocodile and the Monkey. In the story, the wife crocodile is upset and wants the monkey's heart to eat, and the husband finds this out because she is crying "crocodile tears." When I heard the phrase "crocodile tears, I came up the idea of creating a story about how humans began to use to phase "crocodile tears" meaning someone was fake crying. I could use the wife crocodile to trick the husband by fake crying to get everything she wants, and the monkey helps the husband discover that she is fake crying to get what she wants. The final idea came from a combination of two stories
The Monkeys and the Gardner and
The Goblin in the Pool. In the story of
The Monkeys and the Gardner, the gardener tries to take a break from tending the garden to enjoy himself at a fair. He asks the monkeys that live in the garden to help take care of the plants while he is gone and water them. Sadly, the monkeys pull up the roots of the plants to decided how much water to give each plant based on the length of the roots which obviously kills the plants. The monkeys are seen a foolish and not very smart in the story even though they try to help the gardener out. However, in the story of
The Goblin in the Pool, the monkeys know there is a creature in the pond that they want to get water from so they cannot drink from it. A human comes along and helps the monkeys by showing them that they can use a reed to drink out of the pond. In this story, the monkeys can learn from the human on how to drink water without being eaten by the creature. I think the lesson that the monkeys learn in the goblin story can be incorporated into the story from the monkeys in the garden where they learn from watching the gardener how to water the plants.
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