Once upon a time, there was a forest in which lived a fox. She had her burrow there and had no shortage of food either. The only thing that bothered her were hunters. Once in a while there was a hunt in the forest and all the animals were looking for shelter.
The fox was far from her burrow that day. The trumpeting of the hunters and the barking of the dogs were getting closer. Then she remembered that a woodcutter had a house a short distance away. She ran there.
“Woodcutter, can I hide in your house?” she asked him.
The woodcutter did not object and let the fox inside. There the fox waited until the hunt ended. She thanked for the shelter and returned back to her burrow. Her burrow was dug up by hunting dogs who smelled her there, even though she was not at home.
The woodcutter’s house seemed much safer to her than her burrow, so she went to hide there during the next hunts. But once she ran in at the last minute. The hunters spotted her and chased after her. The fox quickly slipped into the woodcutter’s house and hid under the shed, from where she watched everything.
But the hunters saw where the fox was headed, so they also stopped at the woodcutter’s house. The woodcutter was kneeling in front of the house, preparing new seedlings.
“Hey, woodcutter,” the hunter snapped. “We saw a fox running here. Where is she?”
The woodcutter stood and thought. The hunters looked scary and he was afraid to lie to them. But he didn’t want to betray the fox who trusted him either. Therefore, he pointed to the shed behind the door where the fox was hiding and said: “The fox you are looking for is not here.”
The hunters weren’t really clever and were satisfied with what the woodcutter said. They went away. But the fox saw and heard it all. As soon as she felt it was safe outside, she ran away from the woodcutter’s house without looking back. The woodcutter watched her disappear into the forest and became terribly angry that the fox didn’t even thank him for sheltering her.
Did she have anything to thank him for? Try to answer that yourself.
