Little Red Riding Hood
A path through the wood, a basket for grandmother, and a stranger who asked where she lived
Page 1
There was once a little girl who lived in a village at the edge of a very great forest, and everybody loved her, and nobody loved her more than her grandmother, who had once made her a hood of red velvet. It suited her so well that she would not wear anything else, and after a while nobody in that village called her anything but Little Red Riding Hood. One morning her mother packed a basket with a cake and a bottle of wine and told her to take it to her grandmother, who was ill and lived an hour away on the other side of the wood. And she said three things before she let her out of the door: to go straight there, to keep to the path, and to say good morning politely to anybody she met and not to stop.
Page 2
She had not been in the wood ten minutes when a wolf came out onto the path. Little Red Riding Hood had never met a wolf and did not know enough to be frightened of one, and he was extremely pleasant: he said good morning, and asked where she was going, and she told him; and he asked what was in the basket, and she told him that too; and then he asked, in the friendliest possible way, exactly where her grandmother lived. And she told him that as well — the cottage under the three big oak trees, by the hazel hedge, a quarter of an hour further on. The whole thing took about a minute. And the wolf said what a lovely morning it was, and had she noticed the flowers in among the trees, and that her grandmother would surely like a bunch of them; and then he said goodbye and went off down the path, and she turned aside to look at the flowers.
Page 3
The flowers were in a glade a little way off the path, where a tree had come down years before and let the sun in, and there were far more of them than she had expected — white ones and blue ones and great yellow ones, and more again a bit further on, and then more beyond those. She picked one, and then thought that the next was finer; and every time she had picked the finest flower in sight she saw a better one deeper in, and she went after it, and so she got further and further from the path and did not notice. It was a lovely morning and she was perfectly happy. She was going to be a long time.
Page 4
Meanwhile the wolf went straight on down the path and came to the cottage under the three big oak trees, exactly where he had been told it would be, with the hazel hedge round its garden. He knocked. A thin voice from inside asked who was there; and the wolf said, in the best imitation of a little girl that he could manage, that it was Little Red Riding Hood with a cake and a bottle of wine. The voice told him to lift the latch, because she was too weak to get up. So he lifted the latch, and the door swung open, and he went in without saying one word more.
Page 5
He had swallowed the grandmother whole, and then he had put on her cap and her nightgown and got into her bed and drawn the curtains round it, and lay there waiting. And after a long while Little Red Riding Hood came up the garden path with her flowers, and found the door standing open, and thought that was odd; and came into the bedroom and found the curtains drawn round the bed, and thought that was odd too; and said good morning, and got no answer. So she pulled back the curtain. Her grandmother was lying there with her cap pulled right down over her face, and she looked extremely strange. And Little Red Riding Hood stood at the bedside with her flowers still in her hand and said the four things that children in every country in the world have been saying ever since: what big ears you have, and what big eyes, and what big hands — and what a terribly big mouth you have.
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He swallowed her too, the way he had swallowed her grandmother — whole, and in one, and in rather a hurry. And then, being very full indeed, he lay back down in the bed and went to sleep, and began to snore. He snored so loudly that it came out of the open door and across the garden; and a huntsman who had worked that forest since he was a boy was walking past on his way home, and stopped dead in the middle of the path. He knew every sound in that wood. He knew that cottage and he knew the old woman who lived in it, and whatever was making that noise in there was not her. He stood listening to it for a moment with his hand on the gate. Then he came up the path and looked in through the door.
Page 7
He did not shoot. He thought the old woman might still be somewhere inside that animal, and so he put his gun down and took out his knife instead, and went to the bed and opened the wolf up, the way you would open a seam — and he had hardly made two cuts when a red hood came out, and then a little girl, blinking at the light and saying that it had been very dark in there; and after her, slowly and with a good deal of help, came the old grandmother, alive and extremely out of breath but not hurt anywhere at all, because the wolf had been in such a hurry that he had swallowed them both whole. The huntsman sat the grandmother down in her chair and she did not say one word for a full minute. The wolf never woke up through any of it.
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And then Little Red Riding Hood, who had been inside that wolf about four minutes ago and who had recovered from it faster than either of the grown-ups, said that she knew exactly what to do and went out of the cottage by herself. She went down the garden to the little stream below the hazel hedge and picked stones out of the water — big round smooth grey ones, as many as her apron would hold — and carried them back up the path and tipped them out on the bedroom floor. The huntsman filled the sleeping wolf with every one of them, and the grandmother, who had got her breath and her needle back, sewed him up again so neatly that he never stirred.
Page 9
The wolf woke up at about four o'clock, and wanted to get off that bed and out of that cottage — and found that he could not do it. He was so heavy that he could barely lift himself at all, and he got as far as the middle of the garden path, one step at a time, with his sides swinging, and then his legs simply went from under him and he sat down in the lavender and stayed there. The huntsman fetched his barrow and loaded him onto it and wheeled him away, hours deep into the forest, further than that wolf had ever been in his life — and tipped him out there among the rocks and came home in the dark. And the wolf did not come back. Not to that cottage, and not to that path, and not to that part of the country at all.
Page 10
They ate the cake and drank the wine out in the garden under the oaks, all three of them, and the grandmother said she felt better than she had felt for a week, which was probably true and was certainly a very odd thing to be able to say at the end of that particular afternoon. And then the huntsman walked Little Red Riding Hood home through the wood, the long way, on the path. Grimm tells one more thing about her, and it is worth having: some time afterwards she was going to her grandmother's again with another cake, and another wolf came out onto the path and spoke to her — and she did not answer him, and she did not stop, and she did not leave the path for one single step; and she walked straight on to the cottage and told her grandmother about it before she took her hood off. And that wolf got nothing at all.
About this story
- Audience: kids (ages 6–12)
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