Children's Story: The Elephant and the Stake

In India, elephants are often used by loggers to drive logs down the river. However, elephants are enormous, so they have to catch them when they are only baby elephants.

One time, there was a baby elephant who fell into a big elephant trap. Then he was sold to a loggers camp.

This is not to say that the loggers were mean to the baby elephant, because they fed him every day and washed him. The mahout, or elephant driver who would ride his back when he got bigger, was always nice to him, but the baby elephant missed his mother and father very much.

So that the baby elephant couldn't run away into the jungle again, the driver tied his leg to a little stake in the ground every night. Of course, he could have pulled the stake right out of the ground, since he was an elephant, but he thought that he couldn't do it. So he couldn't do it. In this way, loggers in India make adult elephants think that they can't escape by tying their legs to little stakes in the ground when they are only babies.

One day, a mouse heard the baby elephant crying."Why are you crying?" the mouse asked him.

The baby elephant wailed: "I have been separated from my mother and my father. I know that I'm never going to see them again!"

"But why?" asked the mouse. "You're an elephant. You're the biggest animal in the jungle. If you pull your leg, you will pull that stake right out of the ground. Then you'll be free."

But the baby elephant didn't believe the mouse: he didn't think that he could pull the stake out of the ground, so he couldn't do it.

When the elephant told the mouse that he couldn't do it, the mouse shrugged his shoulders and said: "Then I don't care. It's you business, not mine."

A few days later, the baby elephant saw the mouse again. There were two peanuts just out of the elephant's reach, and the mouse had one peanut in his paws. When he saw the baby elephant, the mouse cried out with surprise: "I don't believe it! How come you're still not free?"

But the baby elephant shook his head and replied: "I can't do it. It's too hard."

"You have to believe in yourself," said the mouse. "If I doubted myself like you, the snakes would eat me for sure. It's dangerous to be a mouse, you know..."

The baby elephant was about to ask the mouse to push the second peanut towards him, so that he might take it in his trunk, but the mouse snatched it greedily and ran away with it.

One day, there was a fire in the loggers camp. The fire was soon out of control. Both the loggers and the elephants ran around in a panic, but the mouse wanted to try to help the baby elephant. "Run!" shouted the mouse. "Otherwise, it's all over you!"

But the baby elephant just stood there, still tied to the stake in the ground.

"Please don't give up," pleaded the mouse. "If you will only pull your leg, then you'll pull the stake out of the ground and you'll be free. But you must hurry."

When he saw the other elephants running, when he saw the fire, the baby elephant pulled the stake out of the ground. Then he ran into the jungle, where he found his mother and his father still living in the wild.

Moral: If you believe, you can do it, but you first must convince yourself in your own mind.

The End