Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/523

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disturb the game. So the tiger turned him out, and he went to the elephant. The elephant said : " If you bark the tiger will find us." As he would not stop barking the elephant got rid of him. Then he went to the wild dog, and they used to hunt together. But the wild dog hunts in silence, anil he too could not stand the dog's barking. So he went to the barking-deer and tried to eat her fawn, and barked so much that she turned him out. In the end, he went to man, and man taught him to hunt, and finding his barking useful kept him with him, and made a companion of him.

X. The Mouse.

Men first found rice growing in the middle of a pool, and as the water was deep they sent the mouse to fetch it. Then the men said to her : " Come and take your share." But the mouse answered : " My head is so small I cannot carry loads. Let me eat a little of your rice every day." The men agreed, and since then mice eat the rice of men.

XI. The Shreiv Mouse.

The shrew mouse is the pig of Terhuma, ihe spirit deity. One day a man was laying fish-traps in a river, and whenever fish came near the shrew used to drive them away. So he killed the shrew, and after that he killed a lot of fisii. As it was late, he went to sleep under a large stone called Tsurnga on the river bank. In the night Terhuma came to the river and called out to the stone Tsurnga: " Did you see any bad man here to-day?" " Wliy do you ask ? " enquired Tsurnga. " My pig has not come home to-night, and some bad man must have killed him." The man was afraid, and never again fished in that place.

A man married a woman of the Terhuma, and his wife took him to live in the sky, and he had three sons by her. One day he went out to hunt, and the Terhuma who was with him said : "A wild boar is killing our brother in-law." He looked down and saw a shrew mouse, which he killed. That niyht all the Terhuma came to him with their pots and j)ans, and the man roasted the shrew for his sons and the Terhuma to eat.

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