Vietnamese Legend: Partridge Bird

This story is an attempt by Vietnamese people to explain why a partridge sounds the way it sounds.

Gather around me with some cookies, will you?

A long time ago there was a boy who lost his dad at a young age. His mother mourned over the death for a period of time then decided to remarry. Since the child did not have any other relatives on either side of his family, he was forced to go with his mother to live with her and his stepfather.

The stepfather was a brutal and ill-bred person. He viewed both the mother and child as just people living and eating in his house, nothing more. In the stepfather's eyes, the boy especially was an eye sore since he was not old enough to do anything to help around the house.

The bitterness and hatred the new husband had for the child continued to grow as the days went on. When something went wrong for the stepfather, he would take his anger out upon the little boy. Soon, every day the child was bruised and purple all over.

Partridge Bird

There was nothing special in the man's house and in fact is he had nothing at all. His living wages were based off going into the forests and getting wood to sell. The woman he just married, on the first day after coming home with him, the man makes her go and chopped down wood so he could sell it in the market.

Unfortunately, that year there was barely any rain, which made finding food become harder. Before the drought, a batch of lumber was able to feed the family for a few days but now it was barely enough for a meal. That the little boy was still young and had no life skills to help during this time became a thorn to the stepfather.

"The child only eats and causes me trouble. He does nothing but burden me," thought the man.

He begged and pleaded with the wife to sell the child to someone else so they could take care of him. No matter what the husband said, the mother refused the idea without a second thought. His mother would rather die with her son than be apart from him.

The desire to kill the child of his wife was all the stepfather could think of. A person's life at that time was worth less than a weed cutter. Furthermore, the man could care less about the boy. The number of people starving continued to increase rapidly as a big batch of wood was now only worth one bowl of rice.

One day when the wife left for the market, the husband used that time to take the child to woods. He lured the small boy by saying, "Do you like to climb the guava trees and catch butterflies? Up in the forests you could do that to your heart's content."

Upon hearing this, the boy begged the stepfather to take him along on the trip to the woods. Amazed by the scenery, the little boy happily trotted behind his stepfather not knowing what tired is. The man led the child deep into the forests. When they arrived to where there were a lot of guava trees, the stepfather told the kid, "Here are the guava trees and your bowl of food. I'll come find you later."

With that being said, the man left the boy without a worry and went off somewhere far away to chop down woods. Later that afternoon, as the man stepped into the house he was shocked to see that the child was home before him. As fate turned out, when the boy was wandering aimlessly in the depth of the woods he came upon a group of monks returning home from their pilgrimage.

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