Once there were two bulls which lived in a green meadow where many beautiful flowers were blooming. And they were always wrestling each other, trying to drive each other out of the meadow. Their wrestling was watched by the animals around them. The rabbits hopped with excitement, the squirrels cheered the bulls from the high branches of the trees, only the sheep chewed the grass quietly, not seeming to care much about the wrestling.
A short distance from where the bulls were wrestling there was a beautiful, quiet pond. Frogs lived in it. One of them sat down on a raised rock so that it could see clearly, and began croaking to her frog companions, “The bulls are wrestling! Which one will you bet on? It’s going to be a spectacle.”
Her frog friend jumped up onto the rock beside her. She looked at the bulls and got scared.
“Aren’t you afraid of what’s going to happen next? When the bulls finish wrestling?” She asked the excited frog.
“Afraid? Afraid of what? They are far away. They won’t come to our pond,” laughed the first frog.
But the second frog was not laughing.
“Didn’t you think that the bull who loses might come here to the pond and cool his bumps in the water?”
The first frog laughed so hard he almost fell off a rock.
“You can’t be serious! That the bull would go swimming with us? That’s nonsense. It’s more likely that the sheep will start flying over there.”
But then something happened. The defeated bull had so many bumps that he felt worse than a hangdog. He had the bright idea of cooling his bumps with cold water in a pond. After all, it’s a nice place where he could stay hidden from his rival for a while. And he went right in. He jumped into the water until the waves came up. And as he was walking in the pond, he stirred up the mud and the mud mixed with the water to the point that it destroyed almost all the frogs’ homes.
The first frog was no longer laughing. On the contrary. It was frightened and said to the second frog, “Oh, no! You were right! That bull really came to bathe with us.”
“Well, well,” nodded the second frog. “Sometimes it pays off to heed a warning, even though it may seem silly at first, or the danger it warns of very remote.”
