The Farmer's Wife

A farmer's wife, restless in her marriage to a much older husband, was easily drawn in when a smooth-talking rogue professed sudden love for her. He proposed that if she brought her husband's savings, they could run off together and build a new life.

She agreed eagerly, gathered every coin while her husband slept, and met the rogue at dawn. They traveled together for a while, but as they neared a river the rogue began calculating the cost of keeping her around -- a middle-aged companion who might slow him down, and whose absence someone might soon be searching for.

Under the pretense of carrying the money safely across the river first, he took everything, then asked for her clothes too, "so she could cross unencumbered" -- and simply walked away with all of it, leaving her alone and stripped of everything she had risked.

As she sat grieving on the riverbank, she watched a hungry jackal nearby lose her own meal in almost the same way: distracted by a leaping fish, the jackal dropped the meat she was carrying, only for a vulture to swoop down and steal it, while the fish escaped into the water in the confusion -- so the jackal, too, ended up with nothing.

When the woman mocked the jackal for losing both fish and meat through her own greed and distraction, the jackal turned the same observation back on her with equal sharpness: the woman herself had lost both husband and lover, sitting exposed and alone by the same river -- proof that judging another's folly does not exempt you from your own.