| Vedantic Tales |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
She looked for a
sensible sheep and soon spotted a fine ewe, who stood motionless,
staring at her. The ewe, it so happened, had only a half hour before
given birth to a son. She was now so torn between the impulse to
flee and the impulse to protect her baby that she could do nothing
at all. She stood and breathed heavily.
The lioness crouched, approached, and leapt high into the air, aiming her body at the apparently willing ewe. Then suddenly the long arc of motion broke as though snapped in two, and the great tawny body fell with a dead clunk on top of the baby lamb, missing its true mark. The ewe blinked. In a moment or two Hari emerged from the body of the lioness, blind, helpless, and shaken up from the fall. His mother was quite dead, and no amount of nuzzling or whimpering yielded him any nourishment. So he gave up and floundered out over the grass, dragging himself along on his stomach, mewing, and turning his head this way and that. Soon he came upon the ewe, who had not yet moved; she had been quite stunned. Yet, destined to provide food for Hari in one form or another and obedient to a will infinitely greater than her own, she lay down at his soft, inquiring touch and nursed him.
|
|
|
|
of Hari: The Lion |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
