In the Brothers Grimm tale “Little Red Riding Hood,” the hunter cuts open the wolf’s belly to rescue the victims.
After the wolf swallows both Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, the hunter arrives at the grandmother’s house. He cuts open the sleeping wolf and finds the two victims alive inside. He then fills the wolf’s body with stones, and the wolf dies after waking and trying to escape.
This ending differs from Charles Perrault’s earlier literary version, in which no hunter rescues the girl and grandmother. The Grimms’ version is also commonly confused with later retellings that call the rescuer a woodcutter. In the Grimm text, the rescuer is specifically a hunter.
The tale appeared in the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen, first published in 1812. Its German title is “Rotkäppchen,” meaning “Little Red Cap.”