The Four Friends

Also known as Chaar Mitra

• 4 minute read
• Ages 7-11
• Panchatantra Stories

Beside a quiet lake there lived three friends who had no business being friends at all: a crow named Laghupatanaka, a mouse named Hiranyaka, and a tortoise named Mantharaka.

The crow could have eaten the mouse. The mouse could have kept away from both of them. Instead they met every evening by the water and told each other everything.

The deer arrives

One day a deer came crashing through the trees, wild-eyed and heaving for breath.

The three friends scattered. But when nothing followed her, the crow flew up to look, and came back to say the way was clear.

"Hunters," gasped the deer. "I have been running since morning."

"Then stay with us," said the tortoise. "There is grass here and water and shade."

Her name was Chitranga, and by the end of the week she was the fourth of them.

The trap

Some days later the deer did not come to the evening meeting.

The crow went up and searched, and found her at the far side of the field, caught fast in a hunter's net, pulling and pulling and only drawing the ropes tighter.

He flew back at once.

"Carry me there," said the mouse to the crow. "My teeth can cut those ropes. But we must be fast."

So the crow took the mouse and flew, and the mouse began to gnaw.

And behind them, slowly, painfully, step by step across the whole width of the field, came the tortoise, because he could not bear to wait behind.

"You should not have come," said the mouse, when he saw him arrive. "You are the slowest of us. If the hunter comes now, the deer can run and the crow can fly and I can hide in a hole. You can do none of those things."

He had barely finished speaking when the hunter appeared at the edge of the field.

Everyone plays a part

The mouse bit through the last rope. The deer sprang away into the trees. The crow lifted into a branch. The mouse vanished down a crack in the earth.

And the tortoise stood in the open field with nowhere to go.

The hunter, who had lost his deer, was not going home with nothing. He picked up the tortoise, tied him in a cloth, slung him over his shoulder and set off.

From the trees the deer said, "This is my fault. What do we do?"

"We think," said the mouse. "Quickly."

And here is what they did.

The deer ran ahead along the road and lay down in the dust with her legs folded at odd angles and her eyes half shut, as though she had dropped dead. The crow landed on her side and began to peck at her, the way a crow pecks at something dead.

The hunter came round the bend and stopped. A whole deer, free, right there in the road.

He put down his bundle and ran towards it, pulling out his knife.

The moment his back was turned, the mouse shot out of the grass and cut the cloth open. The tortoise slid out and went straight into the pond at the roadside.

The crow gave a loud caw. The deer opened her eyes, got up, and was gone before the hunter had taken three more steps.

He turned round. His bundle lay flat and empty in the road. Nothing was in it. Nothing was anywhere.

He looked at the road for a while, and then he went home.