The Crows and the Snake: A Panchatantra Story with Moral
Quick answer: The Crows and the Snake retold in full: a crow couple lose their chicks each year to a cobra until a jackal's advice and a stolen necklace end it. Moral and Panchatantra book.
Every spring a pair of crows build a nest, and every spring a black snake in the roots of their tree climbs up and empties it. The Crows and the Snake comes from the Panchatantra's first book, Mitrabheda, and holds one of the collection's most famous nested stories.
The story
An old banyan stood at the edge of a city, and in its upper branches a crow and his wife built their nest year after year. In a hollow among its roots lived a black snake. Each year, when the eggs cracked and the chicks began to cry for food, the snake wound up the trunk at night and swallowed them one by one. Each year the crows grieved, and each year they built again, because it was their tree.
When the fourth clutch was lost, the hen crow said, 'We leave tonight or we watch this forever.' Her husband could not bear to go. He flew instead to a jackal he knew, an old friend under a rock by the river, and told him everything. The jackal listened with his chin on his paws. 'You cannot fight him and you cannot outwait him. So make someone stronger than you want him dead.' Then he told the crow the story of the heron who ate too many fish and met a crab, and explained what he meant.
Next morning the crow flew to the bathing pool below the king's palace. The queen and her women had left their jewels on the steps while they swam. The crow dropped down, seized a chain of gold in his beak, and flapped off slowly, so slowly that the guards saw him and followed with drawn swords and shouting.
He flew straight to the banyan and dropped the chain into the snake's hole. The guards came panting up. One put a stick into the hollow and the snake rose out of it, hood spread, hissing. They killed it with their swords, pulled the chain from the roots, and went back to the palace pleased with themselves, never knowing they had been hired. That spring the crows raised every chick in the nest, and the hen crow said nothing more about leaving.
The moral, and what it actually means
The closing verse says that what cannot be done by force may be done by a stratagem. What the story shows is more specific. The crow does not trick the snake at all. He tricks the king's men into doing his killing, by arranging events so that their interest and his line up for one morning. A small power survives by borrowing a larger one.
Where the tale sits and why it has lasted
It is a tale of Mitrabheda, the first book, famous for what sits inside it: the jackal tells the crow The Heron and the Crab, a lesson within a lesson, a habit of the Panchatantra that later gave the Arabian Nights its shape. It has lasted because the trick is bloodless for the trickster and completely visible to the reader. We watch the chain fall and understand the plan before it lands.
For young readers and classrooms
Best for eight and older, since the yearly loss of the chicks is quietly hard.
Write your own
The engine is the borrowed hand. Give your protagonist an enemy they cannot touch and a third party with power and no interest, then invent the one object that makes the third party's interest and the protagonist's coincide. The chain does everything here; find your chain.
What writers can take from this
- For readers: the snake never speaks and never sees the crow; a faceless antagonist makes the fear larger.
- For teachers: this is the cleanest example in the Panchatantra of the nested tale, and worth diagramming.
- For teachers: read it alongside the Hitopadesha's The Deer and the Crow for another crow who out-thinks a predator.
- For writers: the plan is shown, not explained; the reader assembles it from the slow flight and the dropped chain.
- For writers: give your trickster a real stake. Four lost broods make the theft feel earned rather than clever.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character who cannot confront their enemy arranges for a powerful stranger to do it, using a single object placed in the right spot. The stranger must never learn they were used.
Questions
What is the moral of The Crows and the Snake?
What force cannot achieve, a stratagem can. The crow defeats the snake by making the king's guards want it dead, borrowing power he does not have.
Which Panchatantra book is The Crows and the Snake from?
The first book, Mitrabheda. Inside it the jackal tells The Heron and the Crab, so the tale is also the best known example of the Panchatantra's stories within stories.
Is The Crows and the Snake appropriate for children?
Yes, for about eight and above. The snake's killing of the chicks is stated rather than described, and the clever plan is the memorable part.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
Enter a Writory story contest
Enter the Writory Short Story Contest and have your own story read and scored out of 100. Entries close 25 November. That first entry makes you a Writorian.