A collection Fairy
tales from
Russia. Vsevolod Garshin:
The Frog went traveling.
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In the meantime, the ducks flying behind the front pair that carried her, praised her with loud cries.
"Isn't our frog brainy," they said. "There aren't many as brainy even among the ducks"
The Frog wanted to thank them, but remembering in time" that if she opened her mouth she'd fall from that terrible height, she clenched her jaws all the harder and kept quiet. She swung like that all day; the ducks changed in flight, smartly passing the twig to the next pair, but it was terribly frightening, and the Frog almost croaked from fear, but she had to be brave and brave she was. In the evening, the flock stopped for the night in a strange swamp. At dawn, they were off again, but this time the Frog faced front, and not back as before, the better to see what was below. The ducks flew over reaped fields, yellow forests, and villages where the harvest was stacked in
ricks. They could hear people talking and the sound of the flails with which they threshed the rye. The people craned their necks to see the flock and, noticing something strange about it, pointed with their hands. The Frog terribly wanted to fly lower over the ground, to let the people see her and to hear what they said about her. At the next halt she said to the ducks:
"Couldn't we fly a bit lower? The height makes me dizzy and I'm afraid I'll fall if I suddenly feel bad."
The kind ducks promised not to fly so high. And the following day they flew so low that they could make out what people said on the ground.
"Look, look," the children cried in one of the villages. "Look, the ducks are carrying a frog!" The Frog heard them, and her heart leapt.
"Look, look," the grown-ups shouted in the next village. "You've never seen the like!"
Could they know that it was her idea and not the ducks', the Frog wondered.
"Look, look," the children cried in the third village they flew over. "Who on earth could have thought of such a clever thing!"
This was too much for the Frog and, forgetting caution, she screamed at the top of her voice:
"I did! It was my idea, mine!"
And, with this scream, she went hurtling down to the ground. The ducks cried in alarm; one of them tried to catch the frog in flight, and missed. The Frog, with all her four paws jerking, fell quickly, but as the ducks had been flying very quickly too, she fell not on the hard road, above which she started screaming, but further on, at the edge of the village, flopping luckily into a large, dirty pond.
She popped out of the water at once, and screamed excitedly at the top of her voice:
"It was my idea, mine!"
But there was no one to hear her. The local frogs had hidden in the water, frightened by the sudden splash. They now began to appear from the water one by one, and all stared in dismay at the stranger.
The Frog told them how she had been thinking all her life and had at last invented a new, extraordinary manner of
travelling. She had her own ducks, she told the frogs, who carried her wherever she wanted to go. She had been to the south where
"Soon, very soon," cried all the ducks together. "Quack, quack, quack, quack! It's cold here. We must hurry south, south, south!"
"Give me five minutes, will you?" begged the Frog. "I'll be back, I'm sure to think of something."
She flopped into the water from the snag on which she had climbed again, dived into the mud and buried herself in it
com-pletely so that nothing should interfere with her thinking. The five minutes passed, the ducks decided to take off, and in that precise moment the Frog popped out of the water near the snag, and her face beamed as brightly as a frog's face can beam.
"I've thought of something! I've found a way," she cried. "Let two of you take a twig in your bills, and I'll hang on it in the middle. You'll fly and carry me. The only thing is you must not quack and I must not croak, then everything will be fine."
Although carrying even a light frog for thousands of miles and never quacking was not much fun, the ducks were so delighted with the Frog's cleverness that they all agreed to carry her. They would change every two hours, and since there were so many of them and just one frog, their turn would not come too often. They found a good, strong twig, two of the ducks took the ends in their bills while the Frog hung by her mouth in the middle, and the whole flock took wing.
it was so lovely, where the swamps were so beautiful and warm, and where there were clouds of midges and all kinds of other delicious insects.
"I just dropped in to see how you were," she said. "I'll stay with you till spring until my ducks come back for me. I let them off, you see."
But the ducks never came back. They thought the Frog had crashed on the hard road, and were very sorry for her.
Vsevolod Garshin.
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Next Fairy tales of A. S. Pushkin: On seashore far a green oak towers.
Contents. Tales.
Fairy tales which was written by Tatyana, when she was 11 year old. These fairy tales were published in the local newspaper in 1992: