The Valiant Chattee-Maker

In a certain village there lived a humble chattee-maker, a man who made clay pots, and he was about as far from a hero as a man could possibly be. He was timid and gentle and frightened of his own shadow.

Now, it happened that a great tiger had been prowling around the village at night, and everyone was terrified of it. And it also happened, on one wild and stormy night, that the chattee-maker’s donkey wandered off, and the poor man had to go stumbling out into the dark and the rain to find it.

Through the downpour he saw at last a large dim shape that he was quite sure was his missing donkey. He marched straight up, seized it crossly by the ear, gave it a good scolding and a smack, and hauled it home. But it was not his donkey at all. In the dark and the rain, the chattee-maker had caught the dreaded tiger, which was so utterly astonished at being grabbed and smacked and told off that it simply did as it was told.

He shut the beast in his yard and went to bed. And in the morning the whole village woke to find the terrible tiger tied up tamely behind the chattee-maker’s house. “He caught it with his bare hands!” they cried. “What a warrior! What a hero!”

The chattee-maker was as surprised as anyone. But he did not quite like to argue.

Word of the mighty tiger-catcher spread far and wide, until it reached a great king who was in the middle of a war and losing badly. “Send me this hero!” the king commanded. And so the poor trembling chattee-maker, who had never sat on a horse in his life, was buckled into armour, hoisted up onto an enormous war-horse, and pointed toward the battlefield.

He clung on for dear life. When the horse began to gallop, he wrapped both arms around its neck, and when even that was not enough, in his panic he flung out a hand and grabbed the nearest thing he could reach, which happened to be a young tree growing by the road. But he was holding on so very tightly, and the horse was galloping so very hard, that the whole tree came right up out of the ground, roots and all, in his hand.

And so the enemy army looked up to see, thundering toward them, a roaring man on a giant horse, swinging an entire uprooted tree around his head like a club.

They took one look, decided that no ordinary man could tear a tree from the earth, and fled for their lives, every last one of them.

And that is how the timid little chattee-maker, who had never once meant to be brave in all his life, won a great battle, and a great reward, and was remembered ever after as the most valiant hero in the land.