Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/511

Rh the Fox in South Africa (p. 21). The Hare frightens the Dove into giving him her young ones, as the Jackal does in the other stories, till warned by the Kite; but, whereas the Jackal kills the Heron in one version and maims him in the other, the Hare does not succeed in catching the Kite, and the stratagem he employs is different from the Jackal's. He lies on the ash-heap, and pretends to be dead. The Kite, not completely satisfied, employs a stratagem to make sure, remarking aloud that "the ancients have said that, if a Hare is really and truly dead, he wags his tail." The Hare falls into the trap,—like Brer Fox when he hears that "when a man go ter see dead folks, dead folks allus raises up deir behime leg an' hollers wahoo!", and the Kite escapes.

We have, further, three versions of the very common story in which the Hare and the Hyæna (or some other animal) enter into partnership and start on a journey. In the complete form, the Hyaena, being the stronger, tyrannises over the Hare, who, by his superior cunning, gets the better of him in the end. In Macdonald's Africana, there is a Yao version of this story. I have an incomplete MS. one of a Chinyanja variant, where the Dzimwe is substituted for the Hyæna. But it would take too long to enumerate all which are extant. Büttner substitutes the Mongoose (cheche) for the Hyæna, and it ends up with his being caught cheating, whereupon the two fall to fighting and pull each other's ears off, which they exchange. This is why the Hare has long ears and the Mongoose short ones, as formerly the reverse was the case. I have never met any other example of the story in exactly this form. A closer parallel, fairly complete, is given by Dr. Velten, (Prosa und Poesie, p. 51, "Geschichte