Flop-Ear and Dusty

A lion, badly wounded from a fight with an elephant and too weak to hunt, sent his jackal servant Dusty to find easy prey. Dusty came upon a donkey named Flop-Ear, worn thin by an unkind master who worked him hard and fed him nothing but dust-covered grass.

Sensing the donkey's loneliness, Dusty spun a story of a lush meadow full of gentle company, and even invented three unmarried she-donkeys eager for a husband. Flop-Ear, aching for exactly the companionship being promised, agreed at once and followed him to the lion's hiding place.

But the weakened lion sprang too soon and missed entirely, and the terrified donkey fled back to his old life, having glimpsed only a monstrous, bloodshot-eyed creature he could not explain. Undeterred, Dusty tracked him down again and spun an even more elaborate story -- that the "creature" had been a lovesick she-donkey, heartbroken and threatening to harm herself if Flop-Ear didn't return her affection.

Persuaded once more by the same hope of companionship, Flop-Ear returned -- and this time the lion, better prepared, did not miss. The tale ends not with a moral about the donkey's foolishness alone, but with the jackal quietly eating the best parts of the kill before the lion returned, then talking his way out of the theft with a clever excuse about the donkey supposedly lacking "ears and heart" to have been fooled twice.

What undid Flop-Ear was not stupidity, but a genuine, unmet need for companionship that made the same false promise convincing not once, but twice.