Russian Fairy Tales :: Little Tom Thumb

Little Tom Thumb

An old man lived in a hut with his old wife. One day the old woman was hacking a head of cabbage and accidentally she cut off her thumb. She wrapped it in a rag and put it on a shelf.
Suddenly she heard a whimper coming from the self. She unwrapped the rag and there inside, she found a little boy, no bigger than her thumb.
The old woman was surprised and frightened.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I’m your little son, and I was born from your thumb,” came the reply.
The old woman put him down and saw how tiny he was-from the other side of a room you could hardly see him. So she called him Tom Thumb.
He lived in the house with the old man and the old woman and, though he never grew any bigger, he was brighter and cleverer than any full-sized boy would have been.
One day he said:
“Where is Father?”
“He’s gone to plough,” his mother answered.
“I’ll go and see if I can help him.”
“Yes, do, my child,” replied the old woman.
So he went to the field.
“Hello, Father,” he called.
The old man looked around.
“What’s happening?” he wondered. “I can hear a voice, but I can see no one. Who is calling me?”
“It’s your son, and I’ve come to help you. Sit down, Father; have a bite and rest a while.”
The old man was delighted and sat down to his dinner. Little Ton Thumb climbed into the horse’s ear and they began to plough. But first he said to his father:
“If anyone comes and offers to buy me, go ahead and sell me: I won’t come to any harm and I’ll be back home in no time at all.”
A landowner happened to pass that way, he stopped and stared in surprise: the horse was moving, the plough was ploughing-but there was no ploughman to be seen.
“I’ve never seen the like in all my life,” he said. “A horse that ploughs by itself!”
The old man looked at the landowner.
“Have you gone blind? My son is there, ploughing.”
“Sell him to me.”
“Certainly not! Little Ton Thumb is all the joy we have, my old woman and I.”
“I beg of you, sell him to me Grandpa.”
“Well, maybe. But you’ll have to give me a thousand roubles.”
“As much as that?”
“You can see for yourself, the boy may be small, but he’s smart; he’s no bother, and he can turn his hand to anything,”
The landowner handed over one thousand roubles, took the boy, dropped him in his pocket, and drove off home.
But Tom Thumb bit into the cloth of the pocket, made a hole in it, and ran away.
He walked and walked until the darkness came down round him. Then he did under a flower growing by the roadside and fell asleep.
A hungry wolf came upon him and in a trice had gobbled him up. There was Tom Thumb sitting in the wolf’s belly, none the worse for adventure. But it was not so good for the grey wolf: every now and then he would see a herd of sheep grazing, and the shepherd fast asleep; but just as he was on the point of snatching a sheep, Tom Thumb would bellow as loudly as he could:
“Shepherd, shepherd, wake up, the wolf is going to carry off one of your sheep!”
The shepherd would waken, beat the wolf with his crook, and set his dogs after him. With the dogs snapping and snarling behind him the wolf would escape by the skin of his teeth.
Soon thee wretched wolf was near to dying of hunger. He begged Tom Thumb:
“Get out of my belly!”
“Take me home first, and then I’ll get you out!”
There was nothing the wolf could do but run to the village, and straight to the old man’s hut.
When they got there Tom Thumb leaped out of the wolf’s belly, shouting:
“Death to the grey wolf! Down with the bad grey wolf!”
The old man seized a poker, the old woman her ironing-board, and between them they killed the wolf, pulled off his skin, and out of it made a warm fur coat for their little son.