The three friends made a plan and carried it out as follows: The woodpecker pecked the elephant’s eyes, and the fly and all his kinsmen defecated in them so that the elephant went blind.  Then the frog sat just below the edge of an escarpment and started croaking, so that the elephant, thinking there must be water there, ran in the frog’s direction and fell into the ravine.  Thus died the mighty elephant, killed by the concerted action of three small creatures.

“It also happened to the snake, who was killed by the crow’s cunning,”  said Sambada.

“How was that?” asked Candapinggala.

Sambada continued, “There was once a tree called Sisiapa.  Every day naughty boys came and stripped off its bark, tore off its branches, and carved holes in the wood.  So the tree asked a crow who lived in it whether he knew a solution.  The crow flew away and came back with pieces of meat, which he hung in the tree.  Soon the stench was unbearable for human beings.  So the boys decided to go and play somewhere else.  Now there arrived a snake called Sitara, who settled in a hole under the tree.  One day it climbed up the tree, found the crow’s nest, and ate all the crow’s eggs.  The father crow, when he discovered this, decided to take revenge. ‘But,’ said mother crow, ‘you can’t kill a snake; you’re only a crow!’

“‘Leave it to me,’ said father crow, ‘I will find someone else to do the killing for me.’

“Now it so happened that just then the raja of that country was bathing in the stream near the tree.  The crow quickly picked up the raja’s golden chain, which was lying on the grass, and dropped it near the snake’s hole.  When the raja came back to dress, he missed his chain and called his servants to go and look for it.

“The servants made a great deal of noise as they trampled around so that the snake came out of its hole, thinking it was being pursued.  Just at that moment the king’s men came along, saw the snake, and killed it.  They found the chain and returned it to the king. 

The crows lived on in their tree, undisturbed.”  (In a parallel fable, a snake who came to live in the tree Sisiapa and turned out to be an evil spirit was burnt by the king’s men.  The tree, which had given it hospitality, was burnt with it.  The moral: Do not shelter wicked men.)