The Doves and the Hunter's Net

Long ago, near a village with a great banyan tree, there lived a flock of doves, and their leader was a wise old dove called Chitra.

One morning the flock was flying home, hungry, when the youngest dove looked down and cried, “Rice! Look! A whole feast of it, spread out under the banyan!”

Down below, white rice lay scattered on the ground, gleaming like tiny pearls.

“Wait,” said Chitra. “Rice doesn’t scatter itself. Who put it there?”

But the flock was young and hungry, and hunger is louder than wisdom. Down they flew, all together, and began to eat — and whoomp! — up from the grass sprang a great net, right over every single one of them.

A hunter had put the rice there. And now he was coming across the field, smiling, with a big sack over his shoulder.

The doves panicked. Each one flapped and pulled with all its might — this one north, that one south, this one straight up, that one sideways — and the net only tangled tighter.

“Stop!” called Chitra. “Listen to me! Each of us alone is too small to fight this net. But we are not alone — we are fifty! When I say fly, we all fly together, all at once, all in the same direction. Not fifty small wings. One great one.”

The hunter was close now. The doves stopped flapping every-which-way. They gripped the net in their claws. They waited for the word.

“FLY!”

Fifty pairs of wings beat downward at the very same moment — and the net rose off the ground like a great grey sail, up, up, over the hunter’s head, over the banyan tree, into the open sky.

The hunter stood in the empty field, staring up at his own net flying away, and there was nothing in his sack but morning air.

The doves flew on, carrying the net between them, until Chitra called down toward a hillside: “Old friend! Are you home?”

Out of a burrow popped a little mouse named Hiranya, Chitra’s oldest friend.

“Chitra! What on earth—”

“A net, as you can see,” said Chitra. “Fifty of us could lift it, but not one of us can cut it. That part needs you.”

“Then hold still,” said the mouse, “this is the part I’m good at.”

And Hiranya’s little teeth went nibble, nibble, nibble — and one by one the doves stepped free, shaking their feathers, until the very last one was out, and the net that had caught a whole flock lay in the grass in useless pieces.

The doves rose into the evening together, wing to wing to wing, and if you had been standing in the field below, you would have heard, drifting down, the sound of fifty friends telling one small mouse that his teeth were the mightiest thing in the sky that day.