The Crocodile and the Hare

Check out the nutty plot from a popular second grade kids book we've come across as we've been reading to the kids at Beacon Academy:

Crocodile and Hare are friends. Crocodile invites Hare over to hang out for the evening.  They start drinking beer, each with a long straw into a communal pot in the middle of the hut.  Crocodile overdoes it, and, to quote the book, "gets drunk.  Crocodile gets very, very drunk."  Hare wisely paces himself.  When Crocodile finally passes out, Hare faces a vexing moral dilemma: should he eat Crocodile's eggs, laying so tantalizingly next to the riverbank?  He "thinks and thinks and thinks."  

Apparently his inner wrestling ends quickly, as the next page shows Hare sitting on the riverbank with a very, very fat stomach and food coma setting in rapidly. When Crocodile finally wakes, clearly feeling it from the previous night's excesses, Hare asks him to give him a ride back home across the river.  Crocodile sluggishly agrees; Hare has nearly pulled off his crime. 

Halfway across the river, Crocodile's son swims up, frantically yelling that Hare has eaten the next generation. Crocodile, still too hung over to hear well, asks Hare what he is saying. Hare, ready, like the Grinch, with a lie, tells him that his wife wants him to hurry to the other side.  Crocodile buys it, despite repeated protests from his son. Finally, yards from the river bank, Crocodile catches on, flips Hare into the water, and bites his leg.  Still slow to understand, he again buys Hare's story when he tells him that he is foolishly biting into a log and should let go.  The story ends with a picture of Hare, safely in his house, giving the audience a thumbs up and a big grin.

I have no idea whether or not this is a typical African kids' story.  It's for sale at a local bookstore at a mall, and I think there's a whole series of stories with the upstanding Crocodile and Hare.  Let's hope that Disney doesn't import these lovable guys for major American consumption...

PS Another favorite quote from a later Crocodile story about Monkey: "Crocodile's wife likes eating mangoes. Crocodile's wife likes eating monkeys, too."