The emperor saw such love among the Schildburgers and invited them to breakfast. The mayor and his advisers accepted the most gracious invitation, and soon everyone gathered at the huge imperial table. Next to His Majesty sat the mayor himself, and below, one after another, all the other city fathers. A lot of clever speeches have been said here, but there won’t be enough time to retell everything until the day after tomorrow, and therefore I’ll omit them.
First of all, a large bowl of boiled carp was brought to the table, then another dish of carp, but only prepared in a different manner. After the fish they brought porridge. Then the head noticed that some of the advisers had not yet finished the previous meal, and shouted at them:
- Hey guys! Hurry up and hurry up! And you, Emperor, don’t wait for them! No wonder they say: seven fools do not wait for one.
So, with sayings and jokes, the Schildburgers finished all the rich dishes that had been prepared for them in the imperial kitchen. The emperor listened to them, sometimes he laughed, but it all didn’t fit in his head, how could it be: before the Schild-burghers were famous all over the world for their intelligence and prudence, but now you will hear nothing from them except nonsense and various jokes. And so, in order to finally decide whether the inhabitants of Shilda are really so stupid or just pretending to be fools, the emperor decided to ask them a riddle.
“I was driving to your city of Shilda,” he said, “and I saw a dead wolf lying by the road.” I began to ask why the wolf died right here next to the road? But no one was able to give me an answer. Can you help me figure out why the wolf died?
The Schildburgers answer him:
- This is not a simple matter. Here we need to take advice. And they went to their town hall, where they locked themselves in the Chamber
for sweating. After sweating there for an hour or two, they moved to the Chamber to pore over. There they toiled for a considerable time and finally gathered in the Jester’s Chamber, where they began to lay out what they managed to take, if not by sweating, then by squeezing.
The first Schildburger said that, most likely, the wolf ran barefoot in the snow in the cold, and therefore caught a cold, got sick and died.
Another Schildburger expressed a different guess. The wolf, they say, does not ride a horse, but runs around on its own legs. It’s true, someone chased him, and he let’s run away, but he’s running on his own feet, and the chase is on horses. The wolf sees that the chase is already close, catches up with him, rushes - and the spirit is gone from him.
The third Schildburger gave a new reason:
“The wolf must have had a very great grief, and he was so sad that he didn’t want to live, he just died.”
The mayor stood up and said:
— Dear friends and advisors! Can’t you and I see from our cattle why the wolf died? After all, how many calves, sheep and other creatures did he slaughter in Shilda? But he ate all the meat raw. No one else stewed it for him, cooked it, or fried it. He's not a priest so he can keep his own cook. It doesn’t happen day after day, sometimes it will kill an old cow, her meat is so stringy, try to digest it! Again, the wolf sometimes did not disdain carrion - after all, you have to have a tinned stomach! And I’ll say it again. My godfather's calf died from some kind of infection that week. He threw it out of the countryside, and since then no one has seen this calf. It must be assumed that the wolf, out of hunger, devoured him right in the cold. I suppose after that I ran to the ice hole to drink some cold water. Why are we surprised and guessing here? Anyone can die from such food. And it’s also clear from his teeth that he died from raw meat. His teeth are all white. And hot food turns your teeth black - even small children know this.
As the head said, so the Schildburgers reported to their distinguished guest.
Then the emperor realized that the Schildburgers had no trace of their former mind.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru