Lion and Jackal

Lion and Jackal agreed to hunt together on shares, so that they could lay in a store of meat for their families before the winter months.

Lion was by far the better hunter of the two, so Jackal suggested that his own job should be carrying the game back to their dens, while Mrs. Jackal and the young jackals cut up and dried the meat. He added that they would make sure Mrs. Lion and her family never went short.

Lion agreed, and the hunting began.

The hunt went very well and lasted a good while. Then Lion went home to see his family and to enjoy, as he imagined, a big store of meat. To his utter shock, he found Mrs. Lion and all the young lions nearly dead from hunger and covered in mange. It turned out that Jackal had given them only a few scraps of the animals’ insides, and so little of that as to barely keep them alive. All the while he had told them that he and Lion were having no luck at all with their hunting. Meanwhile Jackal’s own family had been feasting, and every one of them was sleek and fat.

This was more than Lion could bear. He set off at once in a towering rage, swearing to kill Jackal and his whole family wherever he found them.

Jackal had more or less expected trouble. As a precaution he had moved everything he owned to the top of a krantz, a steep cliff that could be climbed only by a very difficult, winding path that no one but Jackal knew.

When Lion spotted him on the krantz, Jackal called out at once, “Good morning, Uncle Lion!”

“How dare you call me uncle, you impudent scoundrel,” roared Lion in a voice like thunder, “after the way you have treated my family?”

“Oh, Uncle! How can I explain? It’s that beast of a wife of mine!” Then came a whack, whack, whack as he beat a stick on a dry hide, pretending it was Mrs. Jackal’s back. His wife had been told beforehand to scream every time he struck the hide, and she screamed with all her might, while the little jackals joined in with a dreadful wailing.

“That wretch!” cried Jackal. “It’s all her doing. I’ll kill her this minute!” And he went on thrashing the hide while his wife and children howled so miserably that Lion begged him to stop beating her.

When things had calmed down a little, Jackal invited Uncle Lion to come up and have something to eat. Lion tried several times to climb the cliff but had to give up. Jackal, always ready with an idea, suggested lowering a reim, a rawhide rope, to haul his uncle up. Lion agreed.

The whole jackal family pulled Lion about halfway up the cliff, and then the reim was cleverly cut. Down went Lion with a tremendous crash that hurt him badly.

At once Jackal set about the hide again, with all his strength, scolding his family for daring to give him such a rotten rope, while Mrs. Jackal and the little ones answered with terrible shrieks and yells. Then he shouted to his wife to bring a strong buffalo reim that would hold any weight.

This was lowered and tied to Lion, and they all heaved away at their uncle. Just as he got high enough to peer over the edge and see the pots full of fat meat bubbling and the strips of biltong hanging out to dry, the reim was cut again. Poor Lion fell so hard that he lay stunned for some time.

When Lion came to his senses, Jackal said, in his most sympathetic voice, that he was afraid it was no use trying to haul him up the cliff. Instead, he suggested roasting a nice fat piece of eland breast and dropping it into Lion’s mouth. Lion, half starved and badly bruised, gladly accepted and sat waiting eagerly for the tasty morsel.

Meanwhile Jackal had a round stone heated until it was red-hot, and he wrapped it in a thick layer of fat from inside an animal so that it looked like a ball of fat. When Lion saw it held out over the edge, he opened his enormous mouth as wide as it would go, and sly Jackal dropped the hot ball right into it. It went straight through the poor old beast and killed him on the spot.

There was, as you might guess, great rejoicing on top of the cliff that night.

About this telling

James A. Honey’s South-African Folk-Tales (1910) contains three separate stories titled “Lion and Jackal” or “The Lion and Jackal.” This page follows the one headed simply “Lion and Jackal,” about the shared winter hunt. The tale just before it in the book uses the same rope-and-hide trick on a riverbank, which shows how freely southern African tellers reused a good episode.

Honey’s English keeps several Cape Dutch words: a krantz is a cliff, a reim is a rawhide thong, and biltong is strips of dried meat. Honey’s introduction describes mixed southern African sources using colonial-era group labels. His wording belongs to the 1910 collection and should not be treated as precise attribution of this individual tale.

Read the original: South-African Folk-Tales (1910), Honey — Project Gutenberg

Suggested for older readers within ages 9–12 with an adult: starvation, staged domestic violence and a fatal hot-stone trick make this a dark tale in which the cheat wins.

The sound of blame

Jackal repeatedly directs Lion’s attention away from himself by pretending to punish his wife. Lion’s request that he stop shows compassion, but Jackal exploits that response to avoid accounting for the missing food and cut ropes. The celebration at the end belongs to the successful tricksters; readers need not share it.

Compare what is heard and what is done

For the beating scene and each rope, write what Lion hears beside what the narrator says actually happens. Which mismatch gives readers knowledge that Lion lacks?

Questions to ask

• How did Jackal cheat Lion’s family during the hunt?
• Why did Jackal pretend to beat his wife?
• Why do you think the story ends with Jackal celebrating instead of being punished?

You may also like

• Lion’s Share — Jackal cheats Lion with a cut thong and a hot stone
• Story of Lion and Little Jackal — Little Jackal escapes Lion again and again
• The Hunt Of Lion And Jackal — another Cape hunting partnership gone wrong