On the price of donkey food.

A folktale

Once upon a time there was a young carving woman who lived a long way away from the village. One day she came to the village to trade her carvings and there she met a rich man who gave her an amazing deal. He would buy all of her carvings, and in trade he would give her a big bucket of gold.

The woman was delighted by this, and gladly took the gold, but upon trying to lift the bucket found she could barely drag it behind her. "I'll never get home like this" She thought. So she made her way to the donkey seller to buy herself a donkey. The donkey seller who was the only one in town, had just sold all his donkeys, and all he had left was a little foal. She bought it, but when the gold was hoisted on its back it couldn’t take it and fell to its knees. The foal looked up resentfully at the woman, and she could only shrug in dismay. All this gold was turning out to be more trouble than it was worth.

“What am I ever to do?” moaned the poor woodcarver

Then the woman had an idea. She took a little bit of the gold and bought some oats for her donkey, she took this and put this on the donkey’s back and then she buried the rest of the gold outside the village. Every day when she came to market she brought her donkey, and every day she took a little of her gold and bought it more food. After many months the little donkey had grown larger and stronger. The woman had cared for it and so when she told it she was going to try again to carry the gold it bowed its head in assent.

But when they came to the place where the gold was buried and dug it up she gasped in surprise, for she had just been reaching her hand down the hole and pulling up nuggets to buy the donkey food. When she looked at the once full bucket now there was only one little nugget left. The woman took it and bought more donkey food and she and the donkey made their slow way home.

The moral of the story is that donkey food is prohibitively expensive.