[From The Flame Tree and Other Folk-Lore Stories from Uganda by Rosetta Baskervi
[From The Flame Tree and Other Folk-Lore Stories from Uganda by Rosetta Baskerville, 1900. See item #23 in the Bibliography. The illustration is by Mrs. E. G. Morris.]
Once upon a time, the King of the Animals, the big grey elephant, gave a great feast and invited all the animals in the Mabira Forest to come to a beautiful glade that no man had ever seen, and there they feasted in the moonlight and sang songs and made jokes and danced.
There was a foolish young elephant at the feast, and he watched the hare dancing to and fro and up in the air, and he wished he could dance too. He thought so much about it that for some days after the feast he was quite ill and did not sleep at night, and at last his mother asked him, “Have you any sorrow, my child?”
He did not like to tell even his mother what was worrying him, but he went off alone to the hare’s house and implored him to teach him to dance. The hare was very surprised and did not know what to say at first. He looked at the elephant’s heavy legs, and he said kindly, “One must begin very young to dance; you elephants can do so many clever things which the other animals cannot do. I don’t think it would suit your figure to dance.”
So the young elephant went sorrowfully home. When the other hares heard of his visit, they laughed very much, for who had ever heard of an elephant dancing?
A week passed, and the young elephant invited the hare to his house. He gave him a beautiful dinner and then said, “I must learn to dance. I think of this all day, and I dream of it all night. You must teach me to dance.”
The hare looked at him in despair. “Your legs are too heavy,” he said at last. “Your hind legs are much too heavy.” Then he went home, rather annoyed. Again the elephant sent for him, but this time the hare would not go. He sent a message, saying, “If you can get a doctor to cut off some of your heavy flanks so that you will be lighter on your feet, I will try and teach you to dance.”
The foolish elephant called in an ape who professed to be a great doctor, and the ape cut all the flesh off his hind legs until only the bones were left, and then he sewed the skin up again. The elephant sent the meat to the hare with a message: “Now you will see that I am in earnest. When my legs have healed up, we will begin the dancing lessons.”
The hares laughed and laughed when they got the message, but they said, “Well, we will have a good feast anyway. ” So they sent for all their relations and had a big dinner of elephant steak with sem-sem sauce.
A few days afterwards, the elephant sent an antelope with a message: “I am very ill indeed; my legs do not heal up, and my doctor thinks he had better sew on the flesh he cut off, so will you please send it back by the antelope?”
What was to be done? Some of the steak remained left over from the feast, but they could not send it back for it had been cooked. The dancing hare said to the antelope, “Stay here and dine with us, and afterwards we will talk over the busines