Zoya asked me today to read her "Little Red Riding Hood" from Ed Hirsch's What Your First Grader Needs to Know. Wolfgang and Psalm were hanging around also and Wolf told me that he had heard this story from his first grade teacher as well.
We started with the story with Little Red Riding Hood getting distracted from her path in the woods by the wolf. Zoya informed me that Red was divulging entirely too much personal information to a stranger. Smile from mom.
Wolf then cut in to let me know that when he heard the story, the wolf ended up getting its stomach cut open! And Red and her grandmother jumped out, alive!
I had never heard that ending to the story. In fact, I was fresh off Lon Po Po, the Chinese version I reviewed in a prior blog, during which the wolf gets tricked and killed by the three kids in the story.
I was rather shocked that Red and her grannie got eaten. I don't think that ever happened to them when I was a kid. Sure enough, a hunter came by to chat with grannie and surmised what had happened when he found a fat wolf snoring inside her home.
He cut open the wolf and out jumped the child and her grandmother! But THEN the hunter placed a bunch of rocks in the wolf's belly, sewed him back up, and then took the wolf back to the woods where it woke up later and vowed not to eat another human due to its terrible indigestion.
HUH?? I found this very funny. And quite P.C. No wonder people think our governor is nuts for authorizing wolf-shootings in subsistence areas where the moose populations are getting wiped out. A wolf can't even die in a fairy tale after it has deceived a gullible little girl and her grandmother!
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