Again the cunning hare deceived the tiger by pretending to ask permission, and when a long distance off he called as before: "Our lord has permission to play the flute. Let him put it in his mouth and blow with all his might. This is the custom of the lord of the flute."
The foolish tiger immediately took the snake's head into his mouth, but the sound that followed came from the tiger, not from the flute, and a terrible yell he gave as the snake bit his mouth! But the hare was far away and would soon have been safe but for an unlooked for accident that nearly ended her life.
The people who lived in that part of the hill and water country were at war with the State that joined them on the north, and thinking that the soldiers of the enemy would soon invade their country they had made a trap in the middle of the path over which the hare was running. First they dug a hole so deep that should anybody fall in, it would be impossible to climb out again. The sides of the pit were dug on the slant so that the opening was smaller than the bottom. Over the top they had placed thin strips of bamboo that would break if any extra weight came upon them and they had covered the whole with grass and leaves so that no traveler would know that a trap was there. Into this hole fell the poor little hare.
Presently the tiger came up to see where the hare had gone, and when he saw the hole in the middle of the path, he called out, "Where are you, friend hare?" and the hare from the bottom of the trap called out, "I have fallen into a trap."
Then the tiger sat on the ground and just bent double with laughter to think that at last he had the hare in his power, but the little animal down in the hole although she did not say anything, thought harder in a few minutes than the tiger had in all his life. By and by as she looked up through the hole she had made in the roof, she saw that the sky overhead was getting darker and darker as a storm was coming on, so in great glee, although she pretended to be very much frightened, she called out as loudly as ever she could:
"Our lord tiger! our lord tiger!"
At first the tiger did not answer, so the hare then called, "Does not our lord see the great danger approaching? Let our lord look at the sky."
The tiger looked up and saw the dark clouds coming slowly, slowly on, covering the whole sky; his laughter stopped and he soon began to get very frightened.
After a while, when it had become still darker, he called to the hare: "O friend, what is the matter with the sky? What is going to happen?"
Then the hare replied: "Our lord, the sky has fallen where you see it is dark; that is far away, but in a few minutes it will fall here and everybody will be crushed to death."