A rich man had one son. When the son turned eighteen, he begged his father for permission to travel to a famous academy. The father let him go, and three times over three years the boy returned home between semesters.
On one voyage home, father and son shared a small boat. A raven landed on the gunwale and croaked a prophecy audible only to those who understood bird-speech. The son, trained at the academy in the language of animals, laughed aloud.
Why are you laughing? asked the father.
The son refused to explain. The father, enraged by what he took to be contempt, had the boy thrown overboard. But a great fish swallowed him and spit him out on a distant shore. He became a shepherd.
Meanwhile, the father's prosperity collapsed. Ravens began appearing at the court of the king and would not leave. No one could interpret their behavior. The king announced a reward — his daughter in marriage — to any man who could decode the ravens' meaning.
The young shepherd came forward. Two ravens are in dispute, he said. The first raven abandoned his wife during a famine. A second raven married her and supported her through hunger. Now that times are good, the first raven wants his wife back. They have come to you for judgment. The king ruled: the wife belongs to the raven who fed her through the lean years. The first raven's claim was rejected. The other ravens in the court enforced the verdict by killing the faithless first husband.
The young man married the princess. On his wedding day, he invited every elderly person in the kingdom to the feast — a quiet plan. His own parents, now reduced to poverty, came among the aged guests. He recognized them. They did not recognize the shepherd-king. He made himself known; the original raven's prophecy — your father will become poor and then rich again — fulfilled itself exactly. They were reunited, and the father understood, too late and then not too late, why his son had laughed.
Gaster's Exempla (No. 335, 1924) preserves the tale as a Jewish folk meditation on Proverbs 18:21 — Death and life are in the power of the tongue. A raven spoke, a father misread, a son fell overboard and rose as a prince. Every word, the sages say, is a prophecy you may not be ready to hear.