The Mouse-Deer and the Crocodiles

Mouse-deer was a tiny forest animal, hardly bigger than a rabbit, with a reputation for clever tricks. One day he wanted to get to the other side of a river. The rains had made it flood, so it was too deep to wade and too fast to swim.

Mouse-deer stood on the bank and called out, “Crocodiles! Crocodiles! The king has given an order. Every crocodile in this river must be counted!”

The crocodiles came up out of the water, more and more of them, until the river was full of them. “Now,” said Mouse-deer, “line up in a row, from this bank all the way to the far bank, so that I can count you properly.”

The crocodiles did as they were told. Mouse-deer hopped onto the back of the first one. “One!” he called. He jumped onto the next. “Two!” Then the next. “Three!” On he went, jumping from back to back and counting as he went, until he leaped off onto the far bank. Then he turned around and laughed at them. “What silly creatures you are!” he said.

The crocodile was furious, and he made up his mind to get even. He waited, and when Mouse-deer came down to the river to drink, the crocodile snapped his jaws shut on one of Mouse-deer’s legs.

Mouse-deer did not panic. He picked up a branch and called out, “Ha! That’s not my leg you’ve got. That’s just a stick of wood. My foot is over here!” The crocodile believed him. He let go of the leg and snapped at the branch instead. And while he was busy with the branch, Mouse-deer bounded away to safety, leaving the crocodile with a mouthful of wood.

Still the crocodile wanted revenge. He lay in the river without moving at all, floating like a soggy old log, waiting for Mouse-deer to come down to the water.

After a while, Mouse-deer did come. He saw the thing floating there and was not sure whether it was a log or the crocodile. So he stood on the bank and said, loudly enough to be heard, “If that is the crocodile, it will float downstream.” The crocodile kept perfectly still, so as not to give himself away. “But if it is a log,” Mouse-deer went on, “it will float upstream.”

At that, the crocodile started to swim slowly upstream, against the current. Now Mouse-deer knew exactly what it was. “Ha, ha!” he called from the bank. “I’ve tricked you one more time!”

Where this story comes from

Mouse-deer, called kancil or pelanduk in Malay, is the great trickster of folk tales from Malaysia and Indonesia, a tiny animal who often outwits bigger ones in these tales. These three crocodile tricks are told together by the American scholar Roland B. Dixon in Oceanic Mythology (1916), a volume of the series The Mythology of All Races. Dixon summarised them from collections of Indonesian tales, and he notes that many stories are told of the tricks the mouse-deer played on the crocodile.

Real mouse-deer, or chevrotains, are small hoofed mammals. Despite their name, they are not true deer: they belong to the family Tragulidae. See the Wildlife Conservation Society’s explanation of the distinction.

Read the original: Roland B. Dixon, Oceanic Mythology (1916), Internet Archive

Best for ages 6–8 — three quick tricks from a small hero with a big brain.

Three ways to control the answer

First Mouse-deer invents an order from the king; next he supplies a false name for the thing in the crocodile’s mouth. Finally he invents a test that makes a hiding crocodile betray itself. Each trick depends on the crocodile accepting Mouse-deer’s description instead of checking what it can observe.

Find the check

Choose one encounter and write the question the crocodile should ask before obeying. In the last scene, explain why swimming against the current proves more than Mouse-deer’s claim about how logs move.

Think about it

• Why did the crocodiles believe that the king wanted them counted?
• How did Mouse-deer get his leg back?
• How did Mouse-deer find out that the log was really the crocodile?

Related stories

• The White Hare And The Crocodiles — a Japanese tale in which a hare tricks crocodiles into making a bridge
• The Monkey and the Crocodile — another clever animal who escapes a crocodile
• The Jackal And The Crocodile — another trickster tale with a crocodile