The Mouse Council

Once upon a time, there was a yard with many different animals living there. The man who owned the yard took excellent care of them. They always had good food and the large stables with red tiled roofs gave them shelter from the rain and the wind. You could hear the happy cows mooing and the little, dainty horses snorting.

However, the yard full of tasty and tantalizing food also attracted hungry mice. They made a hideout in one of the stables and started to breed.

The big and hairy owner of the yard did not like that one bit. He wanted to get rid of the mice, and so he brought in a big orange cat to the yard one day. He didn’t feed it at all and so the cat chased mice all day, day and night, and it ate them.

The cat was a very good hunter, and so the large nest of mice soon diminished by half. He had learned the cunning of hunting from his father, and the mice weren’t great at hiding.

One day, the mice called a council to think of a way to protect themselves from the dangerous hunting cat. They debated for a long time, they banged their gavels a lot, but none of their ideas were good enough for everyone. It was quite late in the evening when a little girl mouse shrieked: “I’ve got it! I know what can save us from the cat!”

The other mice turned to her and waited for her to continue.

The young mouse said: “Let’s think about how the cat hunts us. First, it always watches us in silence. Sometimes we don’t even know that it’s there. Then it crouches and leaps on us, plays with us and then eats…