The animals staged a race between a tortoise and a hare.  

The tortoise, urged on by well-meaning friends who assured him that 
he was, in his own way, every bit as special as the hare, accepted 
the challenge, at first with a stubborn determination to see it 
through no matter what the outcome, and then (because his friends' 
exhortations had begun to cloud his common sense) with a crazy but 
irrepressible hope that victory might somehow be possible for him.  

Despite the seeming pointlessness of the exercise, the hare, since 
he could see no compelling reason to refuse, accepted with an 
amused shrug, and was waiting there at the starting line when the 
tortoise, accompanied by the cheers of his supporters, lumbered up.  

At the sound of the starting shot the tortoise lurched forward, 
placing one foot after the other at what for the hare was an 
excruciatingly slow pace.  The course laid out by the animals 
consisted of one complete circuit of a pond in a clearing in the 
woods.  The hare, who could have completed it in a few seconds, 
estimated that it would take the tortoise at least four hours at 
the rate he was traveling.  

The hare stood still, thinking what to do next and wondering what 
he was doing there in the first place.  As he watched the tortoise 
make his slow way down the grassy path, he was tempted to dash 
around to the finish line and have done with it.  Then, the better 
to please the crowd, he thought he might run to within a few feet 
of the finish line, then wait for the tortoise to catch up with him 
before shooting across to victory.  He liked this idea better, but 
it seemed a bit cruel to him.  And so he walked as slowly as he 
could up to where the tortoise had progressed (a distance of some 
three feet) and sat down to think some more.  

In this manner, the hare followed the tortoise all the way around 
the pond.  The tortoise never once stopped trudging along, but the 
hare was compelled to spend most of the time sitting still and 
thinking.  It was the most time he had ever spent thinking about 
anything in his life.  He vacillated from one plan of action to 
another.  His thoughts ranged from the present situation to more 
universal things.  He considered his place in the world and 
compared it to the tortoise's.  He compared being big and hard and 
heavy with being small and soft and fast.  He tried to imagine what 
it must be like to be a sober and cold-blooded creature that lived 
for many decades, instead of fun-loving and hot-blooded and doomed 
to die after only a few summers.  After four hours of meditating he 
hadn't decided which was better, or even whether one was better 
than the other at all.  

But by the time the finish line was in sight, the hare had attained 
a degree of wisdom seldom attained by his kind.  The first result 
of it was that he had resolved to hang back and let the tortoise 
cross the finish line first.  After all, he had nothing to prove; 
everyone knew he could win if he chose to do so.  It would make the 
tortoise happy, and it would be a gentlemanly thing to do.  In this 
way, both he and the tortoise would win.  

The tortoise was indeed happy when he crossed the finish line ahead 
of the hare.  His supporters were positively ecstatic, clapping him 
heartily on the shell and casting triumphant and, thought the hare, 
rather snide looks in his direction.  A frog who had been 
particlarly vociferous in his support of the tortoise hopped over 
and shook a tiny fist in the hare's face, and said, "I guess he 
taught YOU a lesson, hare!"  

For a long time after that, the hare found himself an outcast among 
the animals.  He was "the hare who'd been beaten by a tortoise," an 
object of scorn and pity.  (The tortoise, on the other hand, was 
much in demand as an inspirational speaker.)  

The hare was a bit stung by all of this at first, but he soon found 
his circumstances rather enviable.  No one ever challenged him to 
races anymore, nothing exceptional was expected of him, and so he 
was free to spend his days basking in the sun and eating sweet 
clover.  Once or twice he caught the tortoise standing and staring 
at him, but he couldn't tell whether the expression on the 
tortoise's face was one of contempt or one of envy.  Whatever it 
was, it wasn't very pretty.  

Then one day a bird came flying over to the hare and said 
breathlessly, "Have you heard?  The 'possum challenged the tortoise 
to cross The Road tomorrow, and the tortoise accepted!" 

The hare was aghast.  "But he'll be killed!" he exclaimed.  "What 
on earth made him think he could do it?" 

"Because he beat you in the race," replied the bird.  "He knows you 
can cross The Road without getting hurt, and since he's faster than 
you he figures he'll have no problem at all." 

"But I only went across The Road and back one time, and that was 
when I was young and stupid," protested the hare.  "My grandfather 
on my mother's side was killed trying to cross The Road!"  But the 
bird had already flown off to tell others the news.  "I let him 
win!  How stupid can one tortoise be?" the hare shouted, to no one 
in particular.  

All day long the hare pondered what to do.  Finally, he ran off to 
try and reason with the tortoise.  The tortoise wouldn't believe 
that he'd let him win the race.  He actually thought he'd won it 
fair and square.  The hare even offered to run another race with 
him to prove what he was saying, but the tortoise only said, "You 
can have your rematch after I cross The Road tomorrow." 

In desperation the hare said, "All right, tell you what I'll do.  
I'll race you across The Road tomorrow.  Is that fair?" 

The tortoise shrugged.  "Sure, if you don't mind being beaten in 
public again.  I don't care.  Just don't get in my way, okay?" 

News of the rematch spread quickly, and the next morning at the 
appointed time a huge crowd of animals was gathered by the side of 
The Road.  The tortoise's supporters were all there to cheer their 
hero on.  He stood shifting impatiently from foot to foot waiting 
for the starting gun to sound.  In the meanwhile, the hare looked 
nervously down The Road in each direction as cars came speeding by 
one quickly after another.  

At the sound of the starting gun, the tortoise stepped forward.  
Three cars had whizzed by before he even had both front feet on the 
asphalt.  He turned and looked back at the hare (who was standing 
still only because he was waiting for a break in the traffic) and 
said, "Can't keep up, eh, hare?"  

In the time it took the tortoise to pronounce this sentence, the 
hare saw his opening and shot across The Road at absolutely top 
speed.  It was awesome.  The other animals let out a gasp in 
unison, partly over the hare's speed and partly because, despite 
his speed, he had just barely slipped by in front of a huge truck.  
The wind from the truck blew up a cloud of dust and knocked a few 
of the smaller animals off their feet.  

When the dust had settled, there was the hare standing on the 
opposite side of The Road.  The tortoise gaped at him in 
astonishment, hesitated, and then lowered his head in shame and 
backed away from The Road.  Seeing this, the hare breathed a sigh 
of relief.  With a wave across The Road at all his former friends, 
he turned and vanished into the woods.
 
The hare never came back across The Road.  (As he would have been 
the first to admit, he was afraid to risk it again.)  Only once in 
a great while a bird would fly back from the other side with 
stories about a wise old hare who lived alone on a great hill and 
taught humility and self-control to all the animals there.  

The tortoise withdrew into himself, figuratively and literally.  He 
became sullen and taciturn and wouldn't talk to anyone anymore.  A 
few mornings later, his horribly crushed body was found at the edge 
of The Road where it had been run over.  Whether his death was the 
accidental result of foolish bravado, or the deliberate result of 
equally foolish despair, no one ever knew. 

20 responses total.

Wow!  One for the keeper-box.  The keeper-box is sorta like
a hope chest but for someone more in their middle years.  It's
where I'll go when I'm ninety and want to remember why I stayed here
so long.

You wouldn't happen to have the exact location of that hill handy, would
you? I'd like to meet that wise rabbit someday.

*Why* did the animals stage a race between a tortoise and a hare?
That's what started all the trouble. It must have been some animal
that thought things had been too peaceful and dull for too long, and
decided that an existential competition would liven things up. But,
who? It was most likely the fox, who eats both tortoises and hares
(when she can't find sour grapes). So now we have the fox, living
among all the animals, realizing that she drove the tortoise to
despair, and the hare to a harmitage. Is she pleased? Regretful?
Or, must probably, just still hungry?

This needs to be linked to Agora!

Great story.  (I nominate it for the June link-of-the-month.)

  hear hear!!!  

i'll even link it a week early. i'd hate for it to be laden ripe
with replies before getting some time in the spring sun.

so entered and verified.

 Coleman Alexander Young!

This isn't the mysterious quote item ...

 You're just saying that to really throw people off!

Really, how did the entire thing get started anyhow? If it was the fox, then
she or he is probably still bored now and would is up to more slightly
interesting jokes, but would the animals really have listened to the fox?
The original story was supposed to have the rabbit as the instigator, but
this is a twist...WHO IS THE CULPRIT?

looks like another case of the thrill-hungry public. notice that the ants
weren't at this race--probably, they were soberly about the business of 
heaping up stores for the fall and winter. no doubt, though, that the 
grasshopper, always an admirer of the hare, _was_ at the race, and although
the author doesn't mention him, i hope he learned some wisdom from his
hero and stopped frolicking every day.

of course, it's the tortise who pays for the appetite of the animal public--
their lust for one challenge after another, each more dangerous than the 
last, ends up consuming him. celebrity is, we see, empty as a shell. sure...
a few slaps on the carapace, speaker's fees that turn first to nightcrawlers
and then to excrement, and then, finally, the tortise himself is no more 
than a decaying blot on the pavement of fleeting fame. the animal public 
goes on, though, vacillating meaninglessly between the craving for excite-
ment and satiety, and never understanding, like our heroic hare does, the
first thing about itself.

The terrible trap of society.

Is this the Brothers' Grimm version? (No Offense but this is sorta deep for a
kid's story

who said it was a kid's story?

Wow, what an exceptionally fine account.  I always suspected something
was omitted from Aesop's version.

The moral, don't forget the moral, Hubris can cause you to lose your hare.

This *is* a real good version.

lovely.

When I read a version of this to my son, he objected to the 
tragic ending.  Up to that point, he says, it was the best 
version of "The Tortoise and the Hare" he ever heard.  I 
tried changing the ending to have a wise old hare on that 
side of the road and a wise old tortoise on this side, but 
he didn't like that, either.  

My daughter's reaction was interesting.  When I got to the 
part at the very end where no one knew whether the 
tortoise's death was an accident or suicide, she immediately 
asked, "Which was it?"  I said, "No one ever found out."  
"But Dad," she objected, "you wrote it, so *you* must know, 
right?  Which was it?" 

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