The Panther

A widow lived with her two girls and her small boy. One morning she told the girls, “Mind the house well while I am gone. Your little brother and I are off to see Grandmother.” The sisters gave their word, and away she went.

Partway along the road she met a panther, who wanted to know her errand.

“My boy and I are visiting my mother,” she told him.

“Sit and rest for a while,” the panther suggested.

“I can’t,” she replied. “The day is getting on, and my mother lives far from here.”

The panther pestered and pestered until she finally sat down by the roadside. “I’ll tidy your hair for you,” he offered, and she let him. But each time his claws raked through her hair they scraped off a little skin, and he gulped it down.

“Ow! Stop that!” she cried. “You are hurting me!”

Instead he clawed even more roughly. She tried to shout for help, but the panther sprang on her and devoured her, and then he killed her little boy as well. He dressed himself in her clothes, put the child’s remains into her basket, and set off for her house, where the two sisters were at home.

“Let me in, my dears!” he called through the door. “Your mother is back!”

The sisters squinted through a gap in the boards. “Mother has smaller eyes than you,” they said.

“At Grandmother’s I watched the hens lay their eggs,” the panther answered, “and that was such a treat that my eyes swelled up.”

“Mother has no spots on her face.”

“Grandmother had no bed to spare, so I slept on a heap of dried peas, and they left marks all over my cheeks.”

“Mother’s feet are smaller than yours.”

“Foolish children! My feet are swollen from the long walk. Hurry up and unbar the door!”

The sisters decided it really must be their mother, and they let the visitor in. Only once it was inside did they see that this was no mother of theirs.

That night, after the girls had gone to bed, they could hear the panther crunching away at the bones from the basket.

“What are you chewing, Mother?” they called.

“Beets,” came the reply.

“Please let us have some beets too! We’re starving!”

“Certainly not. Hush now and sleep.”

The girls pleaded so long that at last the pretend mother tossed them a little finger. They knew at once it belonged to their baby brother. “We have to escape,” they breathed, “or we will be eaten next.” They slipped outdoors, scrambled up a tree in the yard, and shouted down, “Come outside! From up here we can watch the neighbor’s boy getting married!” It was midnight.

The pretend mother came out, saw the girls perched among the branches, and snapped, “How am I supposed to get up there?”

“Sit in a basket and toss us the end of the rope,” they said. “We’ll haul you up.”

So she climbed into a basket. When it was halfway to the top, the sisters set it swinging, knocking it hard against the trunk. To save herself from tumbling out, the pretend mother had to become a panther again, and the panther jumped clear of the basket and fled.

When morning came, the sisters climbed down, sat on their front step and wept for their mother. A peddler of needles stopped to ask what was wrong.

“A panther ate Mother and our little brother,” they sobbed. “It ran off, but it will surely come back and eat us.”

The peddler handed them two needles. “Push these into the seat of the big chair, sharp ends up,” he told them. The sisters said thank you and kept on weeping.

Before long a man who caught scorpions came by with the same question, and the sisters told him their trouble. He handed them a scorpion. “Tuck it behind the kitchen stove,” he advised. The sisters said thank you and kept on weeping.

Next an egg-peddler stopped, asked, and heard the whole sad tale. His gift was an egg. “Hide it in the ashes of the hearth,” he said. Again they thanked him, and again they wept.

A man selling turtles was next; he gave them a turtle and told them to drop it into the water butt in the yard. Last came a seller of wooden cudgels, who listened to everything and gave them a pair of cudgels to hang above the street door. This time the sisters thanked him and carried out every instruction they had been given.

At nightfall the panther returned and dropped into the big chair, and the needles jabbed him. He hurried to the kitchen to make a fire so he could see what had stabbed him, and the scorpion stung his hand. When the flames finally caught, the egg exploded in the heat and splashed into one eye, blinding it. He rushed into the yard and thrust his stinging hand into the water butt, and the turtle snapped it clean off. Then, mad with pain, he burst out of the street door, the cudgels came crashing down on his head, and that finished him.

About this story

“The Panther” is chapter IX of Richard Wilhelm’s The Chinese Fairy Book, translated by Frederick H. Martens (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1921), one of the nursery tales that open the book.

Wilhelm’s note says the panther here is really the same creature as the shape-shifting fox in “The Talking Silver Foxes,” and that the tale is built from motifs also found in “Little Red Riding-Hood,” “The Wolf and the Seven Kids” and “The Vagabonds.” This retelling retains the attack, a child’s remains, and the panther’s violent death; those details make it unsuitable as a gentle nursery story.

Read the original: The Chinese Fairy Book (Project Gutenberg)

Best for older readers with an adult — includes a mother and child killed, cannibalism, a severed finger, mutilation and a fatal trap sequence.

Reading the story closely

The sisters notice mismatches before opening the door, but the panther supplies an explanation for each. Once they recognize the threat, they use its own method against it: an invented wedding explains why they want it to climb. The shift from questioning to deliberate invention marks their change from uncertain observers to planners.

On a drawn floor plan, mark how each later trap sends the panther toward the next one: chair, stove, fire, water and door. This is a chain built from attempts to relieve pain. Discuss the construction on paper; the traps are dangerous fantasy, not an activity to recreate. The helpers’ arrival also matters: the sisters tell others what happened instead of keeping their fear secret.

Talk about it

• How does the panther explain away each thing that seems wrong? Which excuse is the silliest?
• How do the sisters trick the panther into showing its true shape?
• Each helper gives the girls one small thing. How do all the gifts work together at the end?

Related stories

• The Talking Silver Foxes — Wilhelm says its fox is the same beast as this panther
• The Cave of the Beasts — the Wilhelm nursery tale just before this one
• The Great Flood — the next nursery tale, where animals help a family in danger