There are a lot of deer near Boro-tal. He has a wife and a daughter. There is no son. All three. The girl has a groom - Khunsi-tala. He lives nearby, in another tent, and has wooed a girl. Boro don't want to give. Vek asks Khunsi-tal. Two plagues of centuries stand side by side.
Khunsi-tal has a mother and a father. There are also three of them. Boro-tala says one day in the spring:
- Deer digger, they have become incredibly old. We need to move.
They were a bit arrogant. Boro and Hunsi left the new plague with a light plague and followed the wild ones. They left together. With them is a girl, Boro's daughter. Two old women and one old man remained. Boro and Hongsi each caught fifty of the best deer. Just a hundred. Argishili.
Boro went ahead. Hongsi is chasing spare deer. Three argish passed at once. They set up the tent and left for the day. Let's go chase the wild ones. The girl was left alone in the tent. Boro and Hongsi each left separately for the wild ones.
Boro had a long ride. The sun has become low, and he continues to drive. I haven't seen any wild ones. In the evening I saw seven wild polled birds. He has a hiding board*100. With her he crawled towards the wild ones. He crawled for so long that he became warm and sweaty. I looked into the hole (loophoal) of the board.
-Where are the wild ones?
No wild ones. Nowhere. On Kopanica, where there were wild ones, a large live burbot was fighting on snowy sastrugi. Boro rubbed his eyes - no burbot. A woman is sitting in that place. On the right side he scratches his hair.
“I became a woman for nothing - I’ll kill you,” thought Boro. He stuck the gun through the hole in the board. Taking aim, I looked: the woman was gone, empty. Again the seven polled wild ones are walking. One of them was shot. He lowered it, put it on the sled and went back. The plague somehow arrived soon. The low wind carries snow. Having approached the tent close, he tied the reindeer and went to the tent. He wants to see how his comrade has arrived. But for some reason he loaded the gun and crawled towards the tent, as if hiding a wild one. Coming close to the tent, he stuck the gun into the loophole of the board. He thinks: “It’s for nothing that I’ll kill my comrade.”
He sees a hole in the board. He approached him from the direction of the tundra. He sees a man walking from the plague and shouting:
- Hey, comrade! Don't kill me!
Then Boro rose to his feet. He released the deer and approached. Without saying anything, I went to bed. I got up in the morning. After tea he says:
“Even though I’m old, I still have a mind.” This is the time of my death, in my opinion. The wild ones somehow spoiled my mind. I'll die. I lived until the time of my death. Did you ask for my daughter? Take her. Let the deer be together. Take care of my old woman.
On this day we played together again. Four white polled bulls were harnessed by Boro. He put black belts and red straps on four white bulls. I went before Argish.
I drove to a high place and stopped. I stood there for a long time. What did you see? Ahead, the ground is black, like in summer, without snow, you can see. In front of the place where he stands, there is a large lake. There is no ice on this lake.
There are two holes on this lake. Boro-tala stands on one of the Yarovs. Another ravine is directly opposite behind the lake. Having stopped like that, he sits on the sled. His comrades arrived. The son-in-law came up. Boro says:
“My time to die has come.” My ancestors always died here. Already when I saw the wild ones, God took possession of me. This god of this lake is burbot. Get out of here as soon as you stop seeing me. Stop seeing me and come back.
In the middle of the lake, white foam swirls. The water in the pool spins in one direction and then in the other. Boro rose to his feet. He shouted at the deer and hit them with a trochee:
“You can see my path above the water.”
Khunsi and his wife see: Boro jumped with the deer from the ravine into the lake and rode on the water as if on land. I reached the ravine beyond the lake.
Boro shouts all the time:
- Lake! Eat me! Open up your throat.
From that ravine I turned back and again came to the first ravine. He goes back and forth across the lake between the holes. Once again he returned and drove into a pool. He ran into a pool and immediately disappeared. Seven white bubbles*101 appeared from the pool. Two soon disappeared, five are still visible.
The woman, Boro's daughter, says to her husband, Khunsi-tala:
“My father told me this: if you take me today, we will have seven children.” But two of them will still die in this lake.
Then a woman appeared from the pool, whom the old man had seen through the loophole of the board when he was hunting wild ones. Now she scratches the left half of her hair. The other half of the hair is already combed.
This woman sits on the water, squeezing her outstretched legs, and scratching her hair. This woman says:
- Give me two white vials yourself. Your eldest son will be my share from now on. Now go to the tent. Do you feel sorry for the guy? Don't be sorry. There will be many His people on earth.
The woman on the yar asks barusi:
- May you be a god, you have an ear, you have a mouth. You're a barusi for nothing - you have an ear. When the time comes to give up the children, take pity on us. Better take a dog or a deer. If I give up my children, I will suffer a lot.
Barusi wife scratches all her hair:
- If you regret one, then you will need three.
- Why didn’t you say it differently? Why are you speaking so sharply? I won't give birth to children!
- You won’t give it for free! I have long arms - I can reach them everywhere.
She said so and disappeared. The husband and wife returned to their tent.
Let's go home - the Argish woman is leading, the man is chasing the deer. We came to our big tent. Five people began to live together. Then the old people, Hongxi's father and mother and Boro's wife, died. Khunsi and his wife had many children. But there were few deer. Only an argish left. Six guys grew up. The seventh, youngest - daughter. The middle son is a shaman. There is no tambourine, there is no shaman parka, he only speaks like a shaman. At night he plays shaman in his sleep. At night he plays a shaman and says:
- The time of my death is coming. Take me to the lake. If you don't take me to the lake, I'll be completely lost.
His mother and father tell him:
- How can we take you to the lake? Our father died there, it's a bad place. Don't go there. We will carry away four deer and three dogs for you.
Argishil to the lake. Not far from it, near a small lake, on a river, they set up a tent. They made a hole for water.
In the evening, the shaman with his brothers and father and mother, nine people in total, went to the lake. We took deer with us.
The harnessed reindeer and sleds were left in the ravine. We ourselves went down from the ravine to the water on foot. Three dogs and four deer were tied up. Mother says to the lake:
- I feel sorry for my sons. Let the dogs be your share.
They threw dogs and deer into the water. They began to climb up the ravine to the sled. Something was heard. The pool is spinning again. In the pool, burbot became visible. Burbot says:
- At first you were told that your son was needed. Why do you regret not giving? The eldest son would have been tied up and abandoned. Your father sits behind me and says so.
The woman keeps asking:
- Let go of your son! Take the dogs and deer. I feel sorry for the guy!
The burbot disappeared. They went out to the ravine and heard something again. They see a woman in the pool. She says:
- Do you feel sorry for the guy? And your father says this: “Give us the eldest son and the youngest daughter.”
Hongsi then says:
“This barushi won’t let us go.” Let the son come forward, Barusi himself asks.
The guy came forward. From the very beginning, the father, mother and he himself began to ask the Barusi to have pity on them. Suddenly the yar collapsed under the guy, he fell into the water and disappeared. You can't see anything in the water. Then the mother snatched the knife that was used to stab the deer on the shore from somewhere and threatens the woman on the lake:
- May you be a god! May you be human! Come here. I will defeat you with a knife. Come here!
The woman on the lake raised her hand:
- You see my hand! Even if you go to your tent, I’ll get what I need. Together we will come to your tent.
She said this and disappeared. We returned to the tent. Mother and daughter were riding on the same sled. The mother began to unharness the reindeer, the girl went into the tent. She took a cauldron from the tent and went to get water. I filled the cauldron with water. Her mother went to her to help lift the cauldron and take it to the tent. When she came to help, the girl fell into the hole before her eyes. The mother wanted to hold her, but her hand was empty! He fumbles in the water - there is nothing. The mother then says:
— There is no need to throw anything into the lake. There is no benefit from this.
We lived in this place all the time, without making any fuss. The shaman shamanized and said:
“There will be even worse things ahead for us.”
Two sons died in the plague. What remained were Khunsi himself, his wife, daughter Boro, their shaman son and two more sons. The other two guys died of hunger. Not a single deer was left, they were all eaten. They couldn’t find any food. The shaman shamanizes all the time. Nothing helps. Partridges can't get it. Shaman says:
“We will kill our father and mother ourselves.” We will give one to the lake, we will give the other so that the fishery will be ours.
They don't go anywhere because of the chum. The hungry lie in it, there is no strength. The shaman lay there, lay there, and went outside. Near the plague I found wild ones - important and porosity. He killed these wild ones, and they ate them. The next morning they saw that father and mother had died during the night. Two wild ones - Poroz and Vazhenka - this was the price of father and mother. That's what the shaman said.
After that, they began to hunt a lot of wild ones. The shaman made himself a tambourine and made a shaman’s parka. Once a shaman went to look for wild ones and found a tent of Yuraks. They flocked to these idiots. The shaman took a Jura girl as his wife. After that, all three began to live well. We found a very good fishery. They became very rich. All.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru