In ancient times, the tails of hares were completely different from what they are now. The first hare and hare on earth had beautiful, long and fluffy tails. They were very proud of them, considered themselves better than all other animals and often threw out all sorts of things to laugh at them. But one day, because of such a thing, the hares lost their beautiful tails and were left with short, unlike anything else stumps. That's how it was. Once the hares were playing on the bank of the river and saw on the other bank a lawn with green tender grass, they wanted to move there and feast on it. But even in those days, hares did not know how to swim. How can we be here? They thought and thought, and suddenly they heard water gurgling: it was an old turtle crawling out to bask in the sun. The hares' eyes flashed and began to ask the old tortoise:
- Auntie turtle, auntie turtle! They say you have many sons and daughters. Do you really have such a big family?
“True, true,” the old turtle nodded joyfully.
“Since we are talking about large families, our hare family is still larger, and we have more brothers,” said the hare.
- Don't lie. Why do I always only see you two? - answered the turtle. She was, of course, right, we said that in the most ancient times in the whole world there was only this hare and a hare.
“All our brothers are sitting at home,” cried the liar hares, “that’s why you don’t see them!” Don't believe me? Let's do the math and then decide who has the bigger family!
- How will we count? - asked the turtle.
“Today we will count your children, and tomorrow we will count our brothers.”
“Okay,” agreed the old turtle, “but how are we going to count?”
- Call all your children here, let them line up in the river from one bank to the other in pairs, and we will jump along them and count: pair, two, and so on.
“Okay,” said the old turtle.
She called all her children, lined them up evenly in pairs, they stretched out their necks and lay down on the water like floats. The hares began jumping from tortoise to tortoise and counting: “Pair, two, three...”
So we got to the other side. The hares were delighted, jumped joyfully and shouted:
- Stupid, stupid, we deceived you.
Only early they were happy. They themselves crossed to the other bank, but their tails were still trailing behind them before the hares had time to remove them. The turtles, who were closer to the shore, heard the hares screaming, grabbed the hare’s tails with their teeth and began to find out how they had deceived them. The hares rushed and ran away, but only their tails remained in the turtles’ teeth. Since then, hares have stumps rather than tails. And now they say: A hare's tail will never grow back.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru