Do you know where the bear came from?
Before, the bear was a person just like us. There were few people then, and they lived in the forests. They hunted animals and birds there. In the summer they collected mushrooms and berries, dug the roots of plants and stocked them for the winter. And most of all they stocked up on nuts and honey. There were a lot of bees. And they were found in hollows and in earthen holes.
People looked for bees in hollows, and whoever found them first tied that tree with a rope, and no one had the right to touch them.
And at that time there lived one person - an utter lazy person. He didn’t want to look for bees himself, so he tore out strangers.
Life was good for that lazy guy. He grew fat on other people's honey and became as fat as a log. But here’s the problem: it became difficult for him to climb trees for honey.
He began to think about what he could do to make it easy to climb trees. But I didn’t come up with anything.
A lazy man once found out that there lived behind seven forests, behind seven swamps a sorcerer who could do anything.
“I’ll go,” he thinks, “to him. Maybe he’ll make me feel better.”
And he went to that sorcerer. He walks through the forests and looks - the linden tree is tied up. He approached the linden tree, and there the hollow was very low and full of honey.
He tore the honey out of the hollow, ate his fill and moved on.
He goes, and soon there is another linden tree tied with a bee hollow. He tore honey out of this hollow as well.
Whether it was long or short, he finally reached the dugout where that sorcerer lived. I knocked on the dugout and no one opened it: the owner of the house was gone. The lazy man sat down and sat. Suddenly he sees a linden tree with a hollow in front of his nose. The lazy guy got used to picking out other people's bees, and couldn't resist.
As soon as he began to pick honey and gobble it up on both cheeks, lo and behold, the owner was coming.
The sorcerer looked at the lazy man, shook his head and said:
- Well, man, for such evil work, from now on you will only do what to kill bees.
And the sorcerer turned this lazy man into a bear.
That's where the bear came from. And whoever doesn’t believe him, let him catch the bear and ask him himself whether it really was as it was said in the fairy tale.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru