Tradition and story time — not medical advice
The Golden Deer Who Took Another's Place
Retold for young children from Jataka Tales (retold by Ellen C. Babbitt, 1912), public domain.
Long ago there lived a deer the color of gold, with eyes like round jewels and horns as white as silver. He was king of a herd of five hundred deer, and nearby lived another herd with its own king.
The country's king loved to hunt, so the villagers built a big fenced park with grass and water and drove all the deer inside it — that way the king could hunt there instead of taking everyone away from their work each day.
The two deer kings made a fair arrangement with the king: each day, one deer from one herd would come forward, so that no one needed to be chased and frightened, and the rest could live in peace the other days.
One day, the turn fell to a mother deer expecting a baby. She begged her own king to let someone else go instead, just until her baby was born, but he said the rule was the rule. So she went, in despair, to the Golden Deer — the king of the other herd — and asked for his help.
"Go back to your family," he told her. "I will go in your place." And so it was the Golden Deer himself who was found waiting when the cook came.
When the king learned what had happened — that this deer, whose life he'd already promised to spare, had offered himself for a mother he didn't even rule over — he was so moved that he said, "I have never seen such kindness. Rise. I grant you both your lives — and I will never hunt a deer in this land again."
Talk about it (ours, not from the source): the Golden Deer helped a mother from a different herd, not just his own family. Who is someone outside your own family you could be kind to this week?
Source: Jataka Tales, retold by Ellen C. Babbitt (1912, The Century Co.) — "The Banyan Deer". Public domain. Read the original.
Why public domain: US: first published 1912, more than 95 years ago, so public domain in the US regardless of the author's death date (Project Gutenberg eBook #62514).