Misadventures in the Land of Fables #17
A Daw with a String At’s Foot
A jackdaw is caught and kept as a child’s pet escapes, but dies when the string still attached to his foot gets caught on the branch of a tree.
A pitiful tale with an objectionable moral: stick with what you’ve got even if it be degrading servitude—you may end up with worse. If ever a fable needed challenging, this was it.
The Original
The story begins with Jackdaw captured in a hunter’s snare. For a character led by his appetites, this is an all-too-plausible situation. Fortunately, for him, he is not destined for the pot and is given instead to the hunter’s son as a pet or plaything. Thus he finds himself a captive and the central problem of the fable is whether to accept this fate or not.
Jackdaw, as you might expect, chooses to escape. A perfectly understandable decision, but Aesop and his adapters punish him for it. Better to remain in captivity, they say, than risk the uncertainty and chaos of the freedom you once knew. For whom was this message intended? The slave? The subject who regretted a commitment—a job, a marriage—and wished to leave? It may be a pragmatic option, but it’s hard to imagine anyone who might find this argument life-enhancing.
A New Version
My first thought was to find a better reason for this punishment. I imagined him over-exercising his freedom, swooping recklessly through the trees and getting himself literally strung up. But this produced the same result and might even intensify it. As the child’s pet, he amused others; in his escape, he amused only himself, and is punished.
No, this would have to be a happy ending. And if Jackdaw were to be portrayed as selfish then perhaps he should be rescued by one of his peers. Once entangled by in the branches, only another bird (or a human) could release him. A lesson in solidarity. You may escape servitude on your own, but you carry the vestiges with you and you would do well to consider those.
So I set out to write this version, but things didn’t turn out as planned.
The Story Escapes
Getting caught in the trap was a simple matter of recklessness through appetite. It wasn’t about going it alone, selfishness or freedom. The hunter’s decision to make a gift of the bird intrigued me. Why did he think the bird would amuse his son? Was there a prompt? Did there need to be? But from that came the idea of Jackdaw as plaything, a clown who had stumbled into a trap, an actor performing for subsistence, unable to break out, choosing to develop his art rather than seek an escape.
You have to follow where the story leads and it was no longer leading to the rescue. As I went on, it seemed likely the boy would lose interest in his plaything. What then, I asked? What kind of fool would Jackdaw feel himself to be? What would they do with him? It would be then he attempted to break free. This would be the climax. And there would be no punishment and no rescue.
This is the version I wrote: Jackdaw and the Piece of String.
My first idea may have escaped me, but it seems still to be out there, dangling on the end of a string, a spirit of a future unwritten.