The Swan and the Crow

A crow once came to Lake Manasarovar and struck up a friendship with one of the swans there. We will call the swan Hamsa. He had never seen a crow before because crows didn’t visit Lake Manasarovar. It’s much too cold for crows to live there. 

When Hamsa wasn’t drinking milk, he lived on a diet of pearls. He offered his friend the crow some pearls to eat but the crow didn’t like them. He just did not like the taste.

The crow said, “Isn’t there any garbage around here? I like to eat garbage.”

Hamsa couldn’t provide him with any garbage so the crow had to go hungry.

After some time the crow said, “Why don’t you come and stay with me down on the plains? There is plenty of good food down there and we can have lots of fun.”

Hamsa agreed and they flew off to the forest where the crow had been living before flying to the lake. Now the food problem was reversed. There were no pearls to eat and Hamsa did not like the food the crow brought for him. 

On the first day the crow brought a dead lizard for Hamsa to eat but Hamsa did not like the looks of it. He politely refused, preferring to be hungry instead.

A king was hunting deer in that forest. At midday, when it became too hot to run around, he sat down under the branch on which the two birds were sitting. The king asked his attendant for his lunch. As he began to eat, the crow shat on his head.

The attendant of the king got very angry. He shot an arrow into the tree and killed both the crow and the swan. And that’s the end of the story.