Once upon a time there was a woman and her husband who were unable to have children. One day, next to the road they found a young orphan boy who had no home. The woman decides to take the little boy with her and takes care of him with all the mother’s love she had in her. She wants the boy to love her too, but the child was still grieving about his birth mother and father who had both passed away.
Desperate for his love she goes to the local healer, and asks for advice. The healer tells her she needs a special potion, but, it has to contain many ingredients, the most difficult one to find being the whisker of a lion. The new mother will do anything to gain the boy’s love and decides to make a plan to get a lion’s whisker.
She buys meat and goes to the waterhole where a lone male lion was seen. She puts the meat down and hides behind some bushes until the big male lion comes and eats the meat. She does this for weeks on end, each time placing the meat down and sitting just that tiny bit closer to where the lion comes to eat his free meal.
The lion comes back every night and gets familiar with the mother’s smell and seeing her sitting behind the bushes every night. He’s not bothered by her presence, so she comes a little closer every night. Some time later, tired of all those long nights, she is despondent and is sitting on the ground with the piece of meat in her lap. The big lion approaches, and unsure of what to do, he keeps his distance.
The woman cries, and in tears, she starts talking to the lion. ‘If I could get only one whisker from you, my boy would finally find peace and love me too’. The lion answers, ‘I would have given you a whisker a long time ago already if you had asked me, but you don’t need my whisker, you just need to have patience, as you have had with me while waiting to gain my trust’.
From that day onwards the woman was able to think of the boy as a lion and approached him with the same patience and respect until eventually, this boy loved her as much as he loved his birth mother.
