The Donkey in the Tiger Skin

Every morning, a washerman named Clean-Cloth sank his hands into the cold water at the riverbank. He scrubbed one shirt after another until the last of the soap suds floated away. Then he shook each one out hard and hung it on a bamboo pole to catch the sun. He worked like that all day long, from the moment the roosters crowed until night came down. Yet the wages he brought home would hardly fill his two hands.

The washerman owned just one donkey, which carried the clothes from one hamlet to the next all around the village. But lately the donkey had grown terribly thin. Its ribs stuck out under a dull, faded coat, because the ration of dry hay it got each day was so small. It no longer had the strength to pull the cart very far. Clean-Cloth looked at the donkey standing glumly in its stall. It pained him, but he could not see where to find any more fresh grass.

The Panchatantra, an old collection of fables from India, has been told and retold for generations. People still say that short tales like this one were once used to teach wisdom to young princes.

One day, the washerman finished his load of laundry earlier than usual. He led the donkey into the forest to find some fresh grass to ease its hunger. The forest was quiet that day. There was only the rustle of dry leaves underfoot and birds calling to each other somewhere high above. A little deeper in, he stopped short. A tiger lay motionless at the foot of a tree, its body long since cold and stiff.

Clean-Cloth looked at the black stripes on the tiger's skin, then turned to the bony back of the donkey beside him, and an idea came to him. He could skin the tiger and drape the hide over his donkey. Then at night he could quietly let it loose in a field of barley. The farmers would see the striped shape and take it for a real tiger. Nobody would dare come near, and the donkey could eat as much as it liked.

No sooner thought than done. Clean-Cloth carefully skinned the tiger and carried the hide home. He dried it well, then stitched and patched it to fit the donkey's shape. That evening he laid the skin over its back and tied every corner tight. He led it all the way to the edge of the barley field and quietly let go.

The donkey in its tiger shape strolled calmly into the middle of the field. It lowered its head and munched the barley happily until its belly was stretched full. Some way off, a few farmers keeping watch over the field that night saw the striped shape against the dark. They huddled close together and held their breath. Not one of them dared to make a sound.

Toward dawn, before the sky grew fully light, Clean-Cloth came back to the edge of the field and led the donkey home. He took off the tiger skin and hid it carefully in a corner of the house. It went like this every night. The donkey came home full and grew plumper by the day, and its coat turned smooth and glossy. In the end it grew so fat that it could no longer squeeze through the door of its stall the way it used to.

So the barley field shrank a little more each night, and nobody dared go out to chase away that imaginary tiger. The disguised donkey grew bolder by the day, too. It ambled through the field as if it were its own front yard. It ate its way from one row to the next and no longer glanced around nervously as it had on the first nights.

One night, deep in its feast in the middle of the field, the donkey suddenly heard a faint sound drifting from far away. It was a female donkey, calling out to her herd. At that sound the donkey forgot all about the tiger skin it was wearing. It stretched up its neck and let out its own familiar bray, which rang across the whole field in the dead of night.

The farmers hiding nearby jumped, and then they understood at once. A real tiger never makes a sound like that. The fear in their hearts melted away. In its place came a burst of laughter in the dark, because all this time it had only been a donkey in a tiger skin.

They called to one another and stood up. They banged pots and pans and knocked bamboo sticks together to make a terrible racket, shouting all across the barley field to chase the donkey away. Not one of them aimed a stick at it.

The terrified donkey ran for its life, and the tiger skin draped loosely over it slipped a little more with every stride. The skin caught on one thicket, then snagged on another hedge, tearing away in strips, as the donkey raced straight for the washerman's house.

The shouting and the thud of hooves woke Clean-Cloth with a start in the middle of the night. As soon as he opened the door, he saw the villagers gathered in front of his yard. They were pointing at his donkey, with a ragged scrap of tiger skin still dangling from its back.

Clean-Cloth stood frozen, his face burning red with shame. He had no choice but to bow his head and confess everything before the villagers. He admitted that he himself had put the tiger skin on the donkey so that it could steal barley all this time. He pulled the last torn piece of skin from the donkey's back and quietly led it into the stall. He could not bring himself to look anyone in the eye.

From that day on, nobody in the village ever dared to think of putting on a disguise to trick other people. The washerman's donkey went back to its small daily ration of dry hay, as before. It grew noticeably thinner, but it was safe and sound, and nobody touched a single hair on it.

For many nights afterward, the fields lay quiet again, as if nothing had ever happened. Now and then a donkey would still bray somewhere out in the far fields, an ordinary sound, as on any other night. Nobody bothered to lift their head and listen anymore, because now it was simply a donkey braying.