I was reading a folk tale the other day that I hadn’t read since I was a child, ‘How Bear lost his tail’. This folk tale originated in North America (it’s an Ojibwe legend) but it has been retold by Julia Wall and beautifully illustrated by Ali Teo. It’s all about Bear, who thought that he was it, & his tail was so beautiful. All the other animals got a tad sick of this & they thought it wasn’t “all that cool”, but were too afraid to speak up, because Bear had sharp claws.
Anyway, one day Bear saw Fox fishing without a pole, and he wanted to know how he had got such a huge pile of fish. So Fox explained that, by dipping his tail into the water, the fish latched on and “voila”! Well as you can imagine, Bear wanted to do it too! Food was scarce because it was winter and since he had such a huge tail, he was sure to catch bigger fish. So Fox decided to play a trick on Bear… If you want to know the end of the story you will have to read it for yourself, all I can say is the book is beautiful and well worth reading! (even big people should read it if they don’t know it!)