This beloved collection of animal fables and origin stories opens with a resourceful shipwrecked mariner who outwits a gluttonous whale by lodging a raft grating in its throat, forever limiting the giant creature to a diet of tiny fish. Following this, the narrative explains how an exceedingly lazy camel acquired his prominent hump from the Djinn of All Deserts as a punishment for refusing to work alongside the horse, the dog, and the ox. Listeners then encounter a greedy rhinoceros whose tight skin is permanently wrinkled into deep folds after a clever parsee fills the beast's abandoned coat with stale cake crumbs and burned currants. Another tale recounts how the leopard and the ethiopian successfully adapt their appearances to match the dappled shadows of the aboriginal forest by adding spots and painting their skin black with fingertips.
Further adventures follow a curious elephant's child whose short nose is stretched into a practical trunk by a hungry crocodile on the banks of the great grey-green, greasy limpopo river. The collection also explains how the old man kangaroo gains his powerful hopping legs after being chased across the australian bush by a perpetually hungry yellow-dog dingo at the command of the god nqong. Another story details how a stickly-prickly hedgehog and a slow-solid tortoise cleverly confuse a painted amazon jaguar until they evolve into the very first armadillos. The sequence continues as primitive cave-dwellers invent the foundations of written language through playful picture-letters, leading up to a whimsical tale about the creation of the ocean tides by the crab pau amma. Finally, the collection concludes with the domesticating of the wild cat who walks by his wild lone through clever bargains made with the first woman in a dark prehistoric cave.
