St. Macarius was born in Egypt in A.D. 300. From his youth up, he suffered from an extremely tender conscience. Once, when he was a child, he ate a fig that a friend had stolen, and he mourned this sin for the rest of his days. When he was thirty, he moved to the desert to live in solitude.

One day, a hyena knocked on the door of his cell with the top of her head. The “knock” sounded so human that St. Macarius expect to find one of his brother monks standing there. Instead, he found a hyena with its baby (or whelp) clutched in its jaw. The hyena held the whelp out to the saint, crying.

St. Macarius took the whelp in his hands and examined it, trying to understand what was wrong with the small creature. He turned it over and over and finally realized that the whelp was blind in both eyes. He groaned and spat into the whelp's face, making the sign of the cross over his eyes. Immediately the whelp could see and was able to suckle its mother and follow her to the river.

The next day, the hyena returned to the cell of St. Macarius and again tapped his door with her head. This time, she was covered with the wooly skin of a freshly killed sheep. When St. Macarius saw what the hyena had done, he was horrified. “Where have you been? And what have you done?” he said. “Since that skin comes from violence, I don't want it!”

St. Macarius strove to be compassionate toward all creatures, saying, “Christians should judge no one, neither an open harlot, nor sinners, nor dissolute people, but should look upon all with simplicity of soul and a pure eye. Purity of heart consists in seeing sinful and weak men and having compassion for them.”

The hyena stretched out on the ground before him, bending her paws as if she was begging him to take it. St. Macarius considered the spectacle before him and softened slightly. “I told you already that I would not take that skin — unless you promise me that you will never again trouble the poor by stealing their sheep.”

The hyena bobbed her head at him in a wordless agreement. St. Macarius insisted again that she promise that she would never again kill a living lamb, but that she would take her prey only from creatures that had died naturally. The hyena again nodded at St. Macarius, eyeing him steadily.

St. Macarius looked down at the hyena before him and said, “If you struggle to find food, you must always come to me and I will share a loaf of bread with you. From this hour, you must never hurt another creature.” Prostrate before him, the hyena made her pledge.

From that day forward, she would occasionally visit St. Macarius's cell when food was scarce, and he was all too happy to share a loaf with her. And he, for his part, slept soundly on the sheepskin for the rest of his days. He lived to be ninety and is commemorated on January 19.