So the jackal took up the drum but when he got to the rock he accidentally let it fall and it broke and the chickens ran away in all directions; but the chicken that had been at the bottom of the drum had got covered with the droppings of the others and could not fly away; so the jackal thought “Well it is the will of heaven that I should have only one chicken; it is doubtless for the best!” The chicken said to the jackal, “I see that you will eat me, but you cannot eat me in this state; wash me clean first.”

So the jackal took the chicken to a pool and washed it; then the chicken asked to be allowed to get a little dry; but the jackal said that if it got dry it would fly away.  “Then,” said the chicken, “rub me dry with your snout and I will myself tell you when I am ready to be eaten;” so the jackal rubbed it dry and then proceeded to eat it; but directly the jackal got it in his mouth it voided there, so the jackal spat it out and it flew away.

The jackal thought that it had gone into a hole in a white ant-hill, but really it had hidden elsewhere; however the jackal felt for it in the hole and then tried in vain to scrape the hole larger; as he could not get into the hole he determined to sit and wait till hunger or suffocation forced the chicken to come out.  So he sat and watched, and he sat so long that the white ants ate off his hind quarters; at last he gave up and went off to the rice fields to look for fish and crabs.  There he saw an old woman catching fish, and he asked to be allowed to help her.  So the old woman sat on the bank and the jackal jumped and twisted about in the water and presently he caught a potha fish which he ate; but as the jackal had no hind quarters the fish passed through him none the worse.  Soon the jackal caught the same fish over again, and he laughed at the old woman because she had caught none.  She told him that he was catching the same fish over and over again, and when he would not believe her she told him to mark with a thorn the next one which he caught; he did so and then found that he really was catching and eating the same fish over and over again.

At this he was much upset and asked what he should do.  The old woman advised him to go to a cobbler and get patched up; so he went and killed a fowl and took it to a cobbler and offered it to him if he would put him to rights; so the cobbler sewed on a leather patch with a long leather tail which rapped on the ground as the jackal went along.  Then the jackal went to a village to steal fowls and he danced along with his tail tapping, and sang: 

    “Now the Moghul cavalry are coming
    And the Koenda Rajas. 
    Run away or they will utterly destroy you.”

And when the villagers heard this they all ran away and the jackal entered the village and killed as many fowls as he wanted.