It had been the driest summer anyone in the meadow could remember. The streams had shrunk to trickles, the seeds had dried on their stalks, and food was hard to find. A small ant named Nima had searched all day and found only one thing: a single crumb of honey-cake, dropped by a child on the far side of the field. It was the most precious thing in the whole hungry meadow.
Nima hoisted the crumb onto her back — it was twice her size — and began the long march home to her nest.
On the way she passed a beetle slumped against a stone, too weak with hunger to move. "Please," the beetle whispered, "I haven't eaten in three days." Nima stopped. She thought of her own empty nest, and how far she had carried the crumb, and how she might not find another. But she looked at the beetle's tired face and broke off a piece of the crumb. "Here," she said. "This will help." The beetle ate, and some light came back into his eyes. "Bless you, little ant," he murmured, and Nima felt warm all the way down to her tiny feet.
A little farther on, she met a caterpillar who had not eaten, and a ladybug with three hungry children, and a cricket whose leg was hurt. To each one, Nima gave a piece of her precious crumb, until — by the time she reached her own doorstep — there was nothing left at all. She went into her nest tired and hungry and empty-handed, but somehow not unhappy.
The next morning, Nima woke to a strange sound outside her door. She peeked out — and gasped. The beetle had brought a fat seed. The caterpillar had brought a curl of sweet bark. The ladybug's children had gathered berries, and the cricket had carried a whole dried fig. Word had spread through the meadow about the ant who shared her last crumb, and now the whole meadow had come to share with her.
There was so much food piled at Nima's door that she could not eat it all herself. So she did the only thing that made sense to her: she invited everyone to stay, and they spread it out, and the whole hungry meadow had a feast together that lasted late into the night.
"A crumb kept is only a crumb," old Nima would say for years after. "But a crumb shared can feed a whole meadow."
And from that dry and difficult summer, the creatures of the meadow learned to share what little they had — and were never quite so hungry again.