The Fox With The Golden Tail (Some Tales of a Trickster Hero like Brer Rabbit/Anansi/Reynard the Fox)

There was once a fox; a fox named Balder who was born with a pure golden tail that shimmered very brightly in the sun. It was a beautiful tail and Balder was very proud of it.
Unfortunately for Balder, however, there were many people who wanted his tail and were prepared to cut it off to get it; particularly an old witch who lived in the ebony wood whose name was Romana; Romana the terrible.
She longed to own his golden tail because she was sure that, being a very peculiar tail, it must possess some very powerful magic and, when she wasn’t being wicked to other people and casting evil spells upon them as bad witches do, she was trying to find ways to trap Balder.
For instance there was the time when Romana made a pretty collar with gold and jewels and left it by the fox’s hole but when Balder, eager to see what he looked like in it, put it on, it turned into an iron collar with a long chain fastened to a stake in the ground.
Because the collar and the chain were both made of iron it was impossible for poor Balder to escape from them and then, to make matters worse, the fox heard the sound of Romana tramping through the forest cackling to herself saying, “I wonder if that dumb fox has fallen for the trap I set?”.
With not a moment to lose the fox hurriedly, using his hind paws, dug a hole and buried his golden tail and, just as Romana was coming into sight, cried out as if in pain,
“Help me! Please someone. A hunter has caught me and cut off my golden tail”.
“What?”, said Romana to the fox, seeing him without a tail, “Someone else has come along and stolen my prize? Who was this and which direction did he go?”.
“Huh!”, replied Balder, “Tell you and you’ll just kill me. Let me go first and then I’ll tell you”.
The witch scoffed,
“And if I let you go you’ll just run away, you rascal”, she said, “Without telling me anything”.
“Not tell you anything?”, asked the fox, “Do you not think I want to see the person who cut off my beautiful tail caught and punished? And since I cannot punish him myself, being a little fox, I’d be just as happy if you were to do it for me”.
“Alright”, said the Witch, the foxes argument making sense to her and, taking a magic key from her pocket, she bent down and unlocked the iron collar, letting the fox free.
The moment that she did, however, a laughing balder pulled his tail free from the Earth that it was buried under and running off, he chided the witch,
“Some hunter may indeed catch me and cut off my golden tail but not you Romana”.
Another time, the witch made a fake vixen, covering it in real red vixen’s fur and dousing it in a vixen’s scent and placed it at the bottom of a deep pit she had dug then, hiding inside a cavity she had made in the side of a pit she waited until the fox with the golden tail was passing by.
Then, when he was near to the pit, she called out, pretending to be a frightened and injured fox.
“Oh please won’t someone help me”, she cried, “Please. I have fallen down into this deep pit and cannot get out”.
Balder peered down over the edge of the pit and saw the fake vixen at the bottom but she looked so realistic and smelled so much like real vixen that he couldn’t tell she was fake.
“Don’t worry”, he said, “I’ll get you out”.
And, frantically, he looked round about him for a dead branch or anything that could be lowered into the pit.
Unfortunately, the witch had earlier removed all the nearby dead branches and so there was none that he could use and he told this to vixen.
“Well”, said the witch, still pretending to be the vixen, “Why don’t you dangle your fox’s tail over the pit and I will grab hold of it and use it to climb up”.
Hearing this Balder became a little suspicious because he was so used to the Witch’s traps but he didn’t want to risk abandoning a real vixen in danger and so he said,
“Alright. I’ll lower my tail into the pit but only if you swear by Old red, ancestor of all foxes who all foxes know about that you won’t pull me down into the pit”.
Romana thought this a very odd thing to ask but there seemed no harm in it and so she said, “Alright, I swear by.. uhh.. Old Red that I will not pull you down into the pit”.
Now the golden tailed fox knew it must be a trap because there was no such fox as Old Red; he had made it up.
But, because he wanted  to play a trick upon the witch, he gathered together lots of stinging nettles and he lowered them down into the pit instead and shouted down, “There, now my tail is lowered you can grab on to it”.
And the moment he said this the witch rushed out of hiding and grabbed hold of the nettles thinking that they were the foxes bushy tail and Balder heard her give a loud yelp as the nettles stung her.
There was one time when the Witch even pretended that she had turned over a new leaf and she called into Balder’s burrow.
“I don’t want to chase you anymore, Balder. I had hoped we could be friends and, to prove that I mean it, I thought that I would make you a basket of food. What would you like? Whatever it is, I’ll make it for you”.
Balder thought a while quietly. He was very hungry and any chance of a free meal was always welcome but he didn’t trust the witch one inch and so he said to her,
“Being me a roast chicken, a jar full of pickled eggs and a bowl of grease”.
“A bowl of grease thought the witch?”, screwing up her face in disgust, “Who would want to eat a bowl of grease?”.
But she wasn’t bothered what the fox wanted to eat, as long as she could lure him out of his hole and so she went back to her house and prepared him one large roast chicken; one jar of pickled eggs and one bowl of grease and, the next day, she brought them all in a basket and laid them out in front of his hole.
“Oh, Mr Fox”, she said, calling into the hole, “I’ve brought you the food you wanted. Please come out and well share a picnic together as friends”.
And then she laid out a picnic blanket on the ground and waited and, only a few moments later, the fox came out of his burrow and sat down to eat the food and the witch watched as he hungrily devoured the chicken and gulped down a whole jar of pickled eggs.
As he was eating the food, however, the Fox began to get more and more tired; his eyelids growing heavy and, when he had finished the final egg, the witch gleefully announced,
“Ha! I hope you enjoyed all that food Balder because I put a sleeping drug in it and it will be the last food that you ever eat”.
But then, picking up the bowl of grease, Balder poured it over himself so that all his fox fur became slippery and when the Witch tried to grab hold of him she couldn’t.
Several times, she got hold of his golden tail with her bony fingers but each time it slid easily out of her grasp and then, though he was very tired, he managed to drag himself back to his hole where he had a very long and enjoyable sleep.
Oh the Witch tried time and time again to catch Balder but each time, as you can see, it was just too slippery and, eventually, though the Witch never gave up her mad pursuit of it, the fox grew old and his fur became silver white and he even met a charming vixen and had four little cubs, all with tails of gold.