Several kinds of animals live in the oak forest. Foxes have their dens there, hedgehogs their beds in the leaves, and squirrels their houses in the trees. All the animals live together happily there. It’s a sort of an oak village. The owl is the mayor of this forest village. The wisest animal in the forest. From the height, it makes sure that all the animals are doing well and nothing bad happens.
One day, the owl flew above the oak trees and announced to the whole village: “Today I’m calling a competition for the cleanest street.” All the animals listened carefully. Then they looked at the streets in front of their homes and realized that they were truly messy. There were lots pebbles, pine needles, and pinecones strewn everywhere after winter. And because the owl didn’t want this mess to cause anyone to get hurt, and because it wanted the oak forest to look pretty as well, it had called for this competition.
All the animals immediately got to work. They grabbed their broomsticks and started sweeping everything up. The work went really well. Some of the animals even sang as they worked. They were happy to see how nice their village was starting to look. They were also curious about the prize the owl would give to the winner. Everything was going smoothly when suddenly, naughty weasels crept among the animals. They wanted a reward as well and they really wanted to win this competition. But unlike the rest of the animals, they wanted to cheat. And that’s just what they did.
While everyone was carting off their swept up messes to the waste pile behind the forest, the naughty weasels started tossing everything they’d swept up into the tunnels dug up by the moles. And because they weren’t carting anything away, they were the first to be done with their work. A little while later, their cheerful and mocking shouts could be heard through the forest: “We’ve won! We were done cleaning first and we have the prettiest street! We’re going to pick up our prize now! Hooray!”
The mocking jeers of the treacherous weasels echoed through the whole forest. The animals stopped as if stricken. They couldn’t understand it. How was it possible that the weasels started last and were finished first? As the weasels went to pick up their prize, the owl just shook its head. “Are you sure you deserve this prize? That you’ve won fairly?” the owl asked the weasels one last time. “Yes, of course we did,” the weasels replied.
They didn’t know that the owl had been watching the animals work the entire time. Quietly, she’d been circling above the oak village, watching how well everyone worked. So of course she’d seen that the weasels had cheated. She led them through the forest to the mole tunnels. So much waste had been dumped in them that you couldn’t even tell where they had been in the first place. The owl flapped her wings mightily. The leaves and pine needles were lifted and blown away from the tunnels. “And what is this, then?” the owl mayor asked the weasels. And she pointed at the pile of mess she’d blown away from the tunnels. “That was already here. Hmm… It’s – well… We don’t even know where it came from,” one weasel over another tried to make excuses.
The owl was sad that even though the weasels had been found out, they couldn’t come forward and confess. And because the owl was the wisest animal in the oak village, it didn’t allow this kind of behavior to stand. Instead of a reward, it tasked the weasels not just with cleaning up the mess they’d thrown into the mole tunnels, but they also had to help the other animals clear out the mess from their streets. And the owl supervised the cleanup, like the proper and fair mayor that it was.
In the evening, when everything was finished, all the animals had a feast together as a reward. They brought the best treats and talked together and ate. And the weasels? Because they’d ended up working the hardest of all, they were allowed to come sit with the animals and eat as well. And they never forgot that lying and cheating wasn’t worth the trouble.
