Once a Mouse

Marcia Brown retells an Indian fable in the jataka tradition about a hermit who lives quietly in the forest with the power to change one animal into another. He rescues a mouse from a hunting crow by turning it into a cat, and when a dog then threatens the cat he changes it again, and again, until the former mouse is a full grown tiger, powerful enough that no other animal in the forest dares come near it. The tiger, though, starts to forget what it once was, growing proud and boastful, and eventually begins stalking the hermit himself, planning to kill the one creature who actually knows the secret of what he used to be. The hermit, seeing the danger plainly, changes the tiger back into a small, ordinary mouse on the spot and sends it back into the grass, telling it plainly to remember its own true size from now on.

Brown moves the story forward through scale and color rather than crowded detail, boldly cut woodcut figures in strong line and color set against plain backgrounds that let a reader see exactly how much bigger the animal has grown at each turn of the page, mouse to cat to dog to tiger and back again, so the growing animal dominates the page at every stage. It reads quickly for a folktale, more fable than adventure, and it works well read aloud to children around four to eight, who tend to grasp the pride at its center faster than a longer, more explained version of the same lesson would allow, since the pictures make the danger of forgetting your own size obvious well before the text spells it out.