An old Yukaghir wandered through the taiga. Once he saw a small yurt in the taiga. The outside of the yurt was clean. The skins neatly covered the sticks, there was order around. Probably a young, beautiful woman lives here, the old man thought. He hid in the bushes, waiting for the woman to come out. No one came out, and the old man decided that there really was a young girl living in this yurt who was afraid to go out alone.
Evening came, the old man decided to climb onto the yurt and from above, into the smoke hole, to see who lived there. The old man climbed up, looked through the hole and saw: a very well dressed woman sitting near the fire. The woman was sewing something.
The old man really wanted to see the woman's face, and he began to straighten the skins at the top to enlarge the hole. The old man’s face was dirty, he had never washed his face since he was born. The hair on his head was long and dirty, dirt was falling from his eyelashes. The old man tried to open his eyes as wide as possible to look at the woman, and dirt from her hair and eyelashes fell onto the woman.
The woman got scared and decided that this evil monster was sitting in the yurt. She took the vein threads with which she was sewing, tied it to a stick, and began to hold it over the fire so that the threads caught fire and smoked out the monster with a bad smell. Because of the heat, the vein threads scattered in all directions, twisted into rings, shrank and turned black. The acrid smell went up. The smell made the old man sneeze. The woman raised her face up to see who was there. The old man saw the old, ugly face of the old woman, got scared, quickly climbed down from the yurt and shouted: Burn, burn, grandmother, threads, smoke the monster out of the yurt! - He started running wherever he could. He was afraid that the old woman would chase him.
The old woman was so frightened that she could not move. The threads all burned out, her work fell into the fire and also burned, and then the fire went out, darkness fell, silence fell.
The old woman woke up, lit a fire, looked up: there was no monster there. Everything was the same. The old woman came out of the yurt, looked around, and there was a trail from the yurt. She followed the trail. The trail went far into the taiga. The old woman realized that the monster was frightened by the smoking and ran away into the taiga. The old woman returned to the yurt, fanned the fires stronger, boiled tea, drank and went to bed.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru