Once a hare was sitting on the edge of the forest, his front legs were crossed and he was whistling, so loudly that the whole forest was ringing. And a dog walked by. She heard someone whistling, and stopped to listen. “Well, he whistles so well!” she thought. “Who whistles so beautifully?”
She looked around and saw a hare.
- So it’s you, brother Yantsis! - she was surprised. - Whistle, my friend, I really like the way you whistle.
The hare whistled.
- How good! - the dog sighs. “Will you teach me to whistle too?”
“No, my dear,” the hare answers, “you just can’t be taught to whistle.”
- Why is this? - asks the dog.
“You can’t whistle with a mouth like yours.” The hare sat down on his hind legs and whistled again, and the dog stood nearby and listened. She listened for a while and again began to beg the hare to teach her to whistle.
“Your mouth is too narrow,” the hare tells her. “If it were a little wider, maybe you would learn to whistle.”
“Can’t you make my mouth wider?” - asks the dog.
“Perhaps I could saw it a little, then it will become wider,” the hare answers.
The dog really wanted to learn to whistle, so much so that she agreed to be patient while the hare sawed her mouth.
“Okay, brother Yantsis,” says the dog, “we drank, so be it.” It will hurt - I will endure it, just to learn to whistle.
The hare took a saw and sawed the dog’s mouth wider.
“Now try to whistle, just like me,” said the hare and whistled. The dog also wanted to whistle, but that was not the case.
And so she tries to whistle and that, but instead of whistling she only gets one thing: “Woof, woof, woof!”
The dog got angry at the hare:
- Why did you saw my mouth open? Why did you tell me that I would learn to whistle? Now I’ll teach you a lesson!
The hare rushed as fast as he could, the dog followed him. It would have been bad for the hare, but he managed to sneak into the hole. At that time, hares had much longer tails than they do today. When the dog ran up, the hare was already sitting in the hole, only his tail was sticking out of the hole. Then the dog bit off his tail. Since then, all hares have short tails, and when a dog meets a hare, it chases after it and barks: “Woof, woof, woof!”
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru