Once upon a time there was a lion, and the lion had gotten quite sick. He lay around his cave for days, blowing his nose and leaving tissues around, hacking up big gobs of phlegm, and lapping out of the same large bowl of water.
Now, many animals from the surrounding area did come to visit the lion in his time of infirmity. They would bring soup, or a movie, or cough drops, but nothing seemed to make the lion happy. He would roar that the other animals didn’t understand his pain, and order them to leave. This was something of a relief for the others, because they certainly didn’t want to catch whatever the lion had got.
But one animal, the wolf, was something of an instigator, and on a particularly boring day, he went to visit the lion. The lion roared, and yelled, but the wolf didn’t move.
“Did you notice that the fox hasn’t come to see you?” the wolf asked, instead. “That is because he is sleeping in his own cave, because he is also sick. Only, he was sick before you were.”
He tossed around a few words about germs and how they spread, and then let the implication settle in. The next day, he brought the fox to visit. Now, the fox was just fine. No runny nose, no coughing. But the wolf had developed something of a sniffle, and couldn’t help snorting up great heaps of phlegm in front of the lion.
So when he suggested to the lion that the only way to get rid of his cold was to kill the other animal who was sick, the lion immediately struck the wolf down.
The fox was rather surprised by this turn of events. “I was just going to tell you to take a bath and get some sleep,” he said.
So, leaving the wolf’s corpse where it lay, the lion followed the fox’s advice. He felt much better the next morning, and to this day, he still doesn’t know which cure helped him, after all.
The End.
Source: The Lion, the Wolf, and the Fox, Aesop.
