The Crow and the Golden Chain

High in a great banyan tree, a pair of crows had built their nest and raised their chicks each season, year after year. But at the foot of the very same tree lived a black snake, coiled in a hollow among the roots, who had discovered that crow eggs made an easy and delicious meal. Each time the mother crow laid new eggs, the snake would slither up the trunk while she was away and devour them all.

Grieving and desperate after losing yet another clutch, the crow flew to an old friend, a jackal known through the forest for his cunning, and asked for help. "I cannot fight a snake myself," she said, "but surely there is some way to be rid of him."

The jackal thought for a long while. "A snake like that cannot be beaten by strength," he said at last, "only by trickery. Here is what you must do."

He explained his plan, and the next morning, the crow flew toward the palace of the local king, where the queen liked to bathe in a pond just outside the palace walls, always removing her golden jewelry and leaving it on a stone nearby. The crow swooped down, snatched up a gleaming gold chain in her beak, and flew off with the queen's guards shouting and chasing after her.

The crow flew straight back to the banyan tree and dropped the golden chain directly into the snake's hollow at the base of the trunk — then perched calmly in the branches above and waited.

The guards, following the flash of gold, soon arrived at the tree and began digging and searching through the roots for the missing chain. There, coiled among the tree roots exactly where the crow had dropped her prize, they found the snake — and killed it at once, retrieving the queen's chain from beside its body.

With her enemy gone for good, the crow returned to her nest, and from that season on, she raised her chicks in peace.