One summer the bear Bamse was sitting on a hillock and dozed off in the sun. And then Mikkel the fox sneaks out of the forest. He saw a bear and thought: “Are you dozing, grandpa? Oh, you such a couch potato! Well, wait, now I’ll play a joke on you.” He caught three mice in the forest, put them on a tree stump under the bear’s nose, and he quietly crept up to him, barking right in his ear:
- Bang, bang! Wake up, Bamse! Per-gunner behind the mountain.
He shouted like that, and then I ran into the forest! The bear perked up, jumped up awake and looked around, who woke him up? And he decided that it was the forest mice on the stump who had decided to scare him. He wanted to tear them into pieces, but suddenly he saw a fox’s tail flashing between the trees on the forest edge. The bear realized that it was the cunning Mikkel again playing a joke on him, and he set off after the fox. He runs after him over the hills and across the lawns, through groves, copses, bushes - there is only noise all around. The cunning Mikkel was completely exhausted; I barely made it to my hole. And he had a hole under the roots of a large spruce tree. The fox just wanted to sneak into it, but the bear grabbed him by the tail and wouldn’t let him in. The red fox is missing! Only Mikkel was not one of those who lose his head in trouble. He turned around and shouted to the bear:
- Throw away the spruce root - grab the fox's tail!
— Out of fright, the bear let go of the fox’s tail and grabbed a spruce root. And Mikkel the fox goes into the hole! He climbed deeper and shouted to the bear from there:
- What, grandpa, I fooled you again!
- Well, wait, I’ll remember this for you! - the bear roared and wandered back to the hill to doze in the sun.
And from that time on, the fox still had a white mark on its tail from the bear’s paw.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru