The Lion and the Mouse

The lion was asleep in the warm afternoon shade, dreaming lion dreams, when something ran straight across his nose.

A mouse.

The great paw came down — whumph — quick as a trap. When the lion opened one golden eye, there she was under it: a small grey mouse, heart drumming, whiskers trembling.

“Please,” squeaked the mouse. “Please let me go. I didn’t mean it — your nose looked like a hill! Let me go, and — and one day I’ll pay you back. I promise. One day I’ll help YOU.”

The lion began to laugh.

He laughed so hard the paw shook. “You? Help me? Little whisker, I am the king of this whole forest. What could YOU ever do for ME?” He was still chuckling, because the joke had put him in a fine mood. He lifted his paw.

“Off you go, tiny promiser.”

The mouse bowed her small bow and was gone into the grass. The lion went back to sleep and forgot the whole thing by dinner.

The mouse did not forget. Mice never do.

Now — some weeks later, hunters came to the forest. And in the dark of night they stretched their strongest rope net between the trees, and the lion, padding home along his own royal path, walked straight into it.

WHUMPH. The net swept him up. The more he fought, the tighter it held — his legs, his shoulders, even his tail. The king of the forest hung tangled like washing, and he roared his enormous roar into the night:

HELP!

The forest heard. The deer heard, and stayed hidden. The monkeys heard, and gripped their branches. Everyone was too small, or too scared, or too sure that nothing could be done against a hunter’s net.

Everyone except one small grey mouse, who sat up in her burrow and said: “That’s my lion.”

She ran through the dark grass, up the fig tree, and out along the ropes — and began to gnaw. Her teeth were tiny. The rope was thick. She gnawed and gnawed, strand by strand by strand.

“Little whisker,” rumbled the lion, low and ashamed, “the rope is too thick. And I laughed at you.”

“You also let me go,” said the mouse, through a mouthful of rope. “I remember the whole afternoon, not just the laughing. Now hold still — this is the part where I help YOU.”

Snap — one rope. Snap — another. Strand by strand, hole by hole, until the net sagged open and the great lion slid out onto the soft ground, free. An hour later the hunters returned — and found their net empty, with one small, neat, mouse-sized hole in it.

The lion looked at the mouse for a long moment. She fit in one of his footprints.

“I laughed at your promise,” he said at last.

“Kings forget,” said the mouse. “Mice remember.”

He carried her home himself, in the cup of one enormous paw, held so gently she barely felt carried at all.

From that afternoon on, whenever the lion slept in the warm shade, his paw lay open on the grass beside him. It never curled into a fist again — not even in his sleep.