Week Two Story: The Monkey and the Alligator

Mr. monkey liked to eat. Often, he would climb trees and feast on the fruit.  He had tried many different types of fruit, and found it was not the type of fruit that mattered but the location of the tree.  Mr. monkey lived in land with widely varying terrain.  Some soil would be mostly clay, some would contain large amounts of sand, but some soil was quite loamy.  The best example of this soil sat on an island surrounded by marshland.  Mr. monkey used the fallen trees to make his way through the bog and across the water onto the island filled with fruit bearing trees. 

This body of water was not uninhabited. In it lived an alligator who would watch the monkey pass to and from the island. He noticed that the monkey always walked across the trees which had fallen into the water.  Most of these trees barely resembled trees now and resembled logs with rough bark.  The alligator got an idea in his head to catch this monkey.  He often had birds land on him while he was sunbathing, and he would see them on the logs as well.  He figured that he must look like the logs floating in the water. 

The next time the monkey visited the island, he walked all over the island and did not leave until the sun was setting.  when he made it to the shore of the island he looked out across the water and noticed there was an extra log.  He looked closely and saw that one of the logs had one eye.  The alligator, who thought he was being so clever, had left an eye open so he could keep looking at the monkey. 

The monkey yelled out, "Hey alligator, why are you sitting in the middle of my path?"

The alligator, knowing his plan had not worked, responded, "I sat here so I could eat you as you walked by."

The monkey, trying to figure out how to get past the alligator, said, "Why don't you come over here and I'll hop in your mouth."

The alligator swam over to bank and opened his mouth.  The monkey, knowing that the alligator would close his eyes to open his mouth, darted past him and across the water. 

Realizing that he had been tricked the alligator turned and said to the monkey that he truly possessed wits. 



Author's note

 I wanted to take similar characters and put them in different setting and tell a similar story to the original.  I changed some of the details, but the gist of the story remained the same.

Bibliography
Vanarinda Jataka, in The Jataka: Volume 1 translated by Robert Chalmers. Story source

Picture: Alligator that kind of looks like a log Taken by William Wise