There lived a humpback bear. He was a real lazy person. One day he saw a ripe pine cone, and immediately his shoulder began to ache and he began to feel a pricking sensation under his arm.
- How can I, a sick man, climb a cedar tree?
Walks around. Walks through shallow decks. He sees a larger deck and walks straight on it: he is too lazy to step higher. Suddenly: knock! — the cone itself fell onto the bear’s head. From the crown to the feet.
“That’s clever!” said the bear and looked up to see if anything else would fall?
“Oh, great bear,” squeaked the speckled nutcracker, “I threw you the best cone.”
The nutcracker's feathers are ruffled, his voice is trembling. She was sitting on a branch, pecking nuts, dropping a cone, the cone hit the bear. The nutcracker was frightened and did not know how to justify itself.
“I’ve been saving this lump for you all summer, all fall.” I'm very glad you came. I can give you ten more cones.
- Oh, yayla! What a hospitable bird! Thank you!..
This praise made the nutcracker completely happy.
After all, she lost cones more than once. They were picked up by mice, chipmunks, and humans. And no one thanked her. And the bear crunches nuts and rumbles:
- We are friends now. And let our children be friends.
Nobody understood what else the bear said, because
his mouth was full of nuts. Since then, he has become friends with the nutcracker.
For a long time now, the bear has seen how a young cedar tree grows in the middle of a clear clearing, how its dark cones swell and ripen. Now by autumn they have become heavy, like lead. Cedar branches bend to the ground from gravity. It would be quite easy to knock down these cones, but I’m too lazy to collect them.
- Help me, nutcracker!
-Oh, uncle, the grass here is very thick. I can't do it alone. If you allow me, I will call my relatives. - Call me!
The nutcracker flew up to the top of the larch tree, screamed once or twice, and all her relatives and all her acquaintances flocked to the clearing. But the bear knows his business: he hits cones. It hits and hits. When there was not a single cone left on the cedar, the bear sat down to rest. He looks - there are no birds or nuts in the clearing. There is only one rotten lump lying around the back left leg. And the kind nutcracker was not ashamed to fly up to this last cone either. She grabbed it and took it away.
- Ugh! - the bear spat. - Eat my nuts, eat them! No matter how much you eat, by winter you still won’t have a spoonful of blood in your body, a piece of meat with a large
the finger on the bones will not grow. And I was fat, I’ll be even fatter in winter.
In fact, bears always get fatter in winter. But the nutcracker, no matter how many nuts it eats, still cannot get better.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru