The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

A wolf wanted to hunt sheep without being seen. He pulled a sheepskin over his back and slipped into the flock at pasture. The shepherd noticed nothing wrong.

At night the wolf was penned with the rest. That same night the shepherd needed meat for the table. Reaching into the dark fold, he seized the wolf by mistake for a sheep and killed him with his knife on the spot.

About this fable

This fable comes from Aesop, the storytelling tradition of ancient Greece, rather than from India. The retelling follows V. S. Vernon Jones’s 1912 translation of Aesop’s Fables.

In Vernon Jones the disguise works too well: the shepherd, wanting mutton for supper, grabs the wolf in the dark fold and kills it. Joseph Jacobs told a different version in 1894, in which the wolf finds a cast-off sheepskin, eats the lamb that follows it and goes on fooling the flock, with the moral “Appearances are deceptive.” This page keeps Vernon Jones’s ending.

Read the original: V. S. Vernon Jones, Aesop’s Fables (Project Gutenberg #11339, The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing)

Suggested for ages 6–8 with an adult: a brief fable that explicitly describes the wolf being killed with a knife.

A disguise that works too well

The shepherd never recognises the wolf in this telling. That matters: the ending is not a detective story in which truth defeats a clever disguise. The wolf wants the safety of looking like a sheep, but being mistaken for a sheep also exposes him to the shepherd’s choice of an animal for supper. The same trick produces both his apparent success and his defeat.

Separate knowledge from appearance

At the pasture and at the pen, write what the wolf knows and what the shepherd believes. Add what the reader knows. Where does the reader understand a danger that the wolf has failed to consider?

Talk about it

• Why did the wolf dress up as a sheep?
• How did the wolf’s own trick end up catching him?
• What do people mean when they call someone “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”? Can you think of an example from another story?

Related stories

• The North Wind and the Sun — a contest that is won by gentleness rather than by force
• The Crow and the Pitcher — a thirsty crow uses brains, not strength, to get what she needs
• The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats — a Grimm wolf disguises his voice and paws to fool seven little goats