Once there was a boy who lived in a village. He was a shepherd and every day he led a flock of sheep to the meadow. There he would watch them in case a wolf appeared. But the wolf never appeared, and the boy became very bored in the pasture. He got tired of chasing butterflies, so he came up with a very silly idea to get rid of his boredom and have some fun.
“Help! Help!” he shouted. “Wolf! There’s a wolf!”
He shouted so loudly that the people in the village heard him. They rushed to chase the wolf away and protect the sheep. But when they ran into the meadow, they saw the sheep grazing peacefully and the young shepherd laughing until he cried
“He, he, he, what fun! You should see the look on your faces!” The boy was laughing his head off.
You can imagine the village people didn’t like that one bit. They were very angry and would have liked to spank him. They went back to the village cursing.
The boy liked this game so much that the next day he thought he could try it again.
“Help! Somebody help! The wolf has come!” he shouted again, as loud as he could.
The people of the village came running again to chase the wolf away. But again they ran in vain. The boy played a joke on them again.”What a stupid joke,” they said angrily, leaving the boy in fits of laughter.
But on the third day it happened. As the boy was leading his flock out into the meadow, a wolf came running from the woods with his whole pack.
“Help! Help! The wolves are here!” he called over and over, so urgently that a stone would have had mercy on him.
But the people in the village seemed to have gone deaf. They did not, not really. They heard the boy’s call, but they thought, “Oh, yeah, he’s making fun of us again. But this time we won’t fall for it.”
And so no one came to the rescue, and the wolves took all the boy’s sheep. From then on, the boy didn’t play silly pranks on anyone. For he found that when someone keeps lying, no one will believe him even if he happens to be telling the truth.
