This story is basically another version of Aesop’s fable, The Wolf and the Crane, with a Sudanese setting!

One day a wolf met a stork that was foraging for food in the shallows of a river. Being by nature a gregarious fellow, he invited the bird to dine in his lair. So, the next day she flew up to his cave in a nearby hillside. To the stork’s surprise, the wolf served her some soup on a flat plate. Whenever the stork lowered her beak onto the plate, she found that she was unable to take even one sip of the soup. Meanwhile the wolf noisily slurped up all the soup from his own flat plate. When the plate had been licked clean, he turned to the stork and asked, ‘Did you have your fill?’

The stork felt embarrassed and merely replied, ‘al- Hamdu le-llaah’ (Thanks God)

Several days later, the stork invited the wolf to come and dine at her house amongst the trees along the river bank. When he arrived, she offered him soup in a gulla (a small earthen ware jar with a narrow neck). The wolf tried to put his mouth inside the gulla but he couldn’t because the jar’s neck was too narrow. Meanwhile the stork put her beak and long neck inside her jar and quickly drank down all her soup in great satisfying gulps. When she had finished she looked at the wolf and asked, ‘Did you have your fill?’

‘al- Hamdu le-llaah,’ replied the wolf looking down at the gulla beside him that was still full.

A short while later the wolf left the stork’s house feeling very upset. As he climbed the hillside towards his home, he met his old friend the fox. Seeing the look of consternation on the wolf’s face, the fox asked what the matter was.

After being told the full story, the fox laughed loudly and declared, ‘You are the one who started with the wrong and the one who started is the more wrong.’