Read Leaping Beauty: And Other Animal Fairy Tales for Free Online Page A

maybe it was shock. Or blood poisoning.

    The king mourned and vowed to raise his son in the paths of niceness. But everybody called the chimp by the name of So What, because that was the main thing that he said.

    So What was a little devil. He jumped on his father’s hearing trumpets and smashed them. So his father the king wandered around in a constant state of baboon deafness. He couldn’t hear how rude his son was. He loved his son.

    Eventually the king got married again, this time to a body-building gorilla from the suburbs. The new queen was fond of So What for about two minutes. Then she got over it.

    “You and I are going to get along or I’ll break your little neck,” she told him.

    “So what?” said So What.

    “So then you’ll have to wear a neck brace like a huge peppermint LifeSaver.”

    “So what?”

    “Say another word, So What, and so help me…”

    “So help you what?” he said.

    The gorilla queen threw a lamp across the room. She didn’t throw it at So What. She just threw it to release a little nervous energy. So What scampered away, laughing wickedly.

    In the days to come So What delighted in goading his stepmother into throwing lamps.
    She became quite good at it. Soon, if she got a decent head of steam up, she could heave a standing floor lamp a distance of a hundred fifty feet.

    But So What got on her nerves, and the king was lost in a fog of permanent deafness. He was constantly tooling conch shells into new hearing aids that So What stomped on. Between the smashing of lamps and the stomping on conch shells, it was one noisy castle.

    Finally the gorilla queen had had enough. She wrote a letter to the editor of Baboons’
    Home Journal and asked for advice. The editor printed her letter (but in order to protect her privacy, changed her name from “Gorilla Queen” to “Worried in the Royal Castle”). The editor suggested hiring a local hunter to take the little troublemaker out into the woods, kill him, and cut his heart out and bring it back. “Check last month’s issue for delicious recipes, at just pennies a serving!” she concluded.

    The gorilla hired a hunter. He was a human being. Humans are good at hunting. But when the human being got So What to the clearing in the forest, So What fell to his knees and begged for forgiveness. “Please don’t kill me,” he cried. “I can’t help being nasty. It’s the way I am.”

    “Everyone can help how they are,” said the hunter firmly. But some humans are good at kindness as well as hunting. This hunter was one of those. He took pity on the little chimp and said, “Run for your life, So What, for that gorilla stepmother of yours doesn’t put up with any nonsense. If she finds I haven’t killed you, she’ll come after you and throw a lamp at you or something. One of these days the lamp will still be plugged in and you’ll get electrocuted. Run, run, I say, and I’ll buy a piece of chicken liver in the supermarket on the way home and tell her it’s your heart.”

    “You would do that for me?” said So What.

    “Humans are good at lying,” said the hunter. “Besides, a chicken liver is a tiny thing, and that’s about how big your heart is so far. I hope you learn some manners, my boy. If you were my chimp, I’d put you over my knee and give you a good spanking.”

    “So what,” said the chimp.

    “So long,” said the hunter, and he made good his promise. When the queen saw the chicken liver lying in a little Styrofoam carton, she cooked it up with onions and sherry and ate it for a snack. Then she went to tell her husband that their little boy seemed to have run away. The king got a flashlight and went to hunt in the hedges, but he couldn’t find his boy.

    Meanwhile, So What wandered in the forest looking for someone to annoy. He considered throwing stones at squirrels, or throwing squirrels at stones, but he could only find stones. It was too dark and gloomy in the forest for right-thinking