The Clever Rabbit Judge

Two men from the same Khmer hamlet in southern Vietnam took their traps into the forest one afternoon, as the leaves rustled in the wind. One chose to set his trap right on the ground, on a trail where wild animals often passed. The other climbed up to a high fork in a tree and set his trap there. He tied the cord carefully before climbing back down. The next morning, mist still hung over the tips of the grass. In the whole forest only one deer had been caught. Yet both men stood side by side, pointed at the deer, and said exactly the same words: "This deer is mine."

The truth was plain, but nobody would say it. During the night the deer had strayed and stepped straight into the trap on the ground. The man with the trap in the tree checked his own trap first and found it empty. Then he saw the deer caught in the other trap. Quietly he freed the deer, hoisted it onto his shoulder and hung it in his own trap up in the tree. Only when all was in place did he shout for his neighbor to come and see. "Here it is, the deer caught in my trap!"

The two men argued, and neither would give way. In the end they took their quarrel to the local magistrate. The magistrate heard the whole story and nodded. Then he ruled at once by an old custom he often used. An animal caught in a person's trap belongs to that person. The trap in the tree held the deer, so the deer belonged to the man who set the trap in the tree. The magistrate tapped his hand lightly on the table, and that was the end of it. He never asked how a four-legged deer could have climbed up into the fork of a tree. The man with the trap on the ground trudged home alone, empty-handed.

He had lost a whole deer, just for arriving half a step too late.

On his way home, he passed a rabbit nibbling grass under a tree beside the trail. Its ears were pricked up for every bit of news in the hamlet. When it saw the man walk past with a gloomy face and long, heavy sighs, the rabbit hopped out to block his way and asked what was wrong. After hearing it all, the rabbit blinked and broke into a bright smile, as if this were nothing at all. "That's easy," said the rabbit. "Go home and pick me a bunch of really ripe bananas from the garden. I'll win the deer back, down to the last hair."

The man was overjoyed. He ran to his garden, picked a bunch of golden bananas and brought it to the rabbit under the tree. The rabbit tucked the bananas away at the foot of the tree for later. It brushed off its paws and stood up. Then it calmly led the man back to the magistrate's house and asked for the case of the deer to be judged once more. The magistrate had set a time and had been waiting since early morning. Yet the rabbit and its companion dawdled all along the way. They stopped to gaze at the clouds, then stopped again to listen to the birds. The sun was already quite high when they finally arrived.

The magistrate slapped the table and demanded to know how they dared keep him waiting so long. The rabbit pressed its two paws together before its chest and spoke in an honest voice. "Your Honor, we are late because we stopped to watch a school of fish in the stream. They were climbing a tree together to pick leaves to eat. We were so caught up in it that we forgot all about the road."

The magistrate burst out laughing, with a touch of scorn in his voice. "What strange talk is this, Rabbit? Fish that can climb trees? Such a thing could never happen."

The rabbit had been waiting for exactly those words. Calmly it answered, one word at a time, very clearly. "Your Honor is quite right. A fish could never climb a tree. And yet the other day, Your Honor yourself ruled that a four-legged deer was caught in a trap high up in the fork of a tree. If a fish has no way to climb a tree, then how could a deer ever climb all the way up there?"

The whole courtyard fell silent. The magistrate sat frozen, and his face slowly turned red. He thought it over again and again, but found not a single word to answer the rabbit. After a long while he sighed and nodded. He admitted that he had judged carelessly the other day, ruling in a hurry before he had asked enough to get at the truth. He sent for the man who had set the trap in the tree. He told him to give the deer back to its rightful owner, the man whose trap had caught it the night before.

The man with the trap on the ground was overjoyed. He led the deer home, and he even came back to clasp the rabbit by the paw and thank it again and again. The other man stood there with his face burning red. He bowed his head, admitted he was wrong, and dared not argue another word. As for the rabbit, it asked for nothing more. It simply hugged the whole bunch of bananas and plopped down at the foot of the tree. It ate until its belly was full, then lay back and slept a long, sound sleep.

The Khmer people of southern Vietnam still tell this tale to their families today. They tell it whenever someone in the hamlet tries to come out in the right with nothing but empty words, without asking what really happened. When the tale is done, the elders often laugh. They say that even now, whenever someone hurries to settle a matter and forgets to ask carefully how it all began, a rabbit is sure to be listening somewhere. It is just waiting with one sharp question in reply, and the whole case turns upside down at once.