Once - and it was in ancient times - the women went into the forest to collect maize, but they collected only a small handful of grains. Sad, they returned to the village.
A few days later, taking one of the boys with them, they went into the forest again, and this time they found a lot of maize. And immediately they began to pound to knead bread for the men, who were soon to return from hunting.
But the boy stole a lot of maize grains and, so that the women would not see, he poured them into bamboo vessels, which he brought for that purpose.
And he returned to his hut, and poured out the maize, and gave it to the old woman, saying:
– The women stayed in the forest, they knead bread. Knead bread for me, grandma; I want to eat it and treat it to the other boys.
The old woman fulfilled his request, and when the bread was ready, the boys ate it. And then they cut off the old woman’s hands and tongue so that she could not tell about the theft. And they cut off the tongue of a tame parrot with bright feathers and released into the wild all the tame birds that were in the village.
But they were afraid of the wrath of their fathers and mothers and therefore decided to flee to heaven. And so they left the village, went into the forest and began to call the hummingbird pyodduddu. When the bird arrived, they stuck the end of a thick rope into its beak and tied the other end to its paw. And they said to the bird:
“Fly and tie the end of the rope that is in your beak to a vine here on earth, and the end that is in your paw to a tree there in the sky.” And choose the thickest tree of all that grows in the heavenly forest.
The bird did as they asked. And then the boys began to climb the vine one after another, like a ladder, and the nodes of the vine served them instead of steps. And when the vine ended, the boys hung on the rope, which the bird tied to the last knot.
Meanwhile, the mothers returned to the village and, not finding their sons, asked the old woman and the parrot:
-Where are our sons? Where are the sons?
But neither the old woman nor the parrot answered.
One of the women looked towards the forest and saw a rope, the end of which was lost in the clouds, and on the rope - a long line of children climbing into the sky.
The woman called others, and they all ran into the forest and began to loudly call their sons and gently ask them to come back to the ground. But the sons did not want to listen and continued to climb higher and higher. Then the mothers began to cry and lament and, crying, begged their sons to return to live happily with them again. But the sons remained deaf to the pleas and, on the contrary, began to climb even faster.
And then the women, seeing that it was useless to ask, began to climb up the liana themselves, and when the liana ended, they began to climb the rope in order to quickly catch up with their sons.
The boy who stole the corn was the last to rise and therefore the last to reach the sky. Having entered the sky, he looked down and saw a long line of women on a rope. Then he cut the rope, and the women fell to the ground in all directions and turned into various animals and wild beasts.
And the evil children, as punishment for their cruelty, were condemned from that time on to look at the ground all night long and every night see again and again what happened to their mothers. The eyes of these evil children are the stars.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru