Two people are lost. They were herding deer and got lost. And they were so exhausted, and they didn’t even have anything to eat. And suddenly three plagues came towards them.
They enter the first tent. A buried woman sits in it.
She says:
- Oh, the guests have arrived, there’s nothing to treat you with. Apparently, my owners didn’t leave anything for me to eat at the grave.
(When the dead die, if no meat is left for them, then they are hungry in the next world, they say.)
They enter the second tent. There is also such a woman sitting there. She didn't say a word and they walked out of there.
They enter the third tent. There a woman sits and says:
“Eat what I have, but I don’t have a fire, apparently my owners*84 didn’t leave me any matches.” Well, rather than go hungry, eat a little fat.
One, the youngest, ate this fat. When they left, the elder said:
- Why did you take this? By God, something will happen to us if you take food from a dead man.
The elder makes his friend throw away this fat, but he hides the fat in his mitten and deliberately says that he threw it away.
Then they walk and walk and see: another huge plague. And they hear a tambourine - apparently the shaman is doing shamanism.
They come in and the shaman is really doing shamanism, and the fire is barely visible. And what they say to each other, the fire always crackles after their words.
And the shaman says:
“Probably guests have come to us, that’s why our fire is crackling!”
The guy who took the fat saw the girl and sat down next to her. And he pinches her all the time.
She shouts:
- Oh, oh, my side hurts!
Her father says to the shaman:
- Well, who came to us, why don’t you see, shaman?
Shaman says:
— Between two ngoa (doors; in the next world there are two doors) two guests are sitting. One will soon be happy, he will come into his own world.
Another has a riddle in his mitten, and he asks that they guess it.
The one with the fat in his mitten heard these words and said to his comrade:
- Let's go quickly!
When they left, the comrade said:
-What do you have in your mitten? Let me see.
He says:
- No, no, nothing, an empty mitten.
He didn't show, and so they move on.
They see: there is still a big plague. And you can hear the noise and noise inside it.
The one who has no fat in his mitten listens and thinks: “These are some special people; it seems that these are not even people.”
The other one doesn’t listen to anything, he goes on and on.
Then the first one says:
- Let's pass by, don't go into this tent.
And he says:
- No, let's go in and see what kind of people live.
- Well, let's go in, but you will be the first to enter.
- Well, anyway, I’ll be the first to go in.
As soon as they entered, they saw that the chum was full of seagulls*85.
Smart says:
- Well, I said that these were not people, but you didn’t listen.
-What are you afraid of?
When the seagulls saw them, they immediately fell silent.
The smart one sees that two small, pretty, motley seagulls are sitting on different bobos opposite each other. And he thinks to himself: “Apparently, they are girls or something.”
Then one large seagull jumped out and muttered something. The smart one thinks: “However, she says to my friend: “Sit down next to one motley seagull.”
He sent his comrade, he sat there. After this, the seagull muttered something again.
The smart one thinks: “Apparently, she’s telling me to sit next to another motley seagull.”
And he also went and sat down. Then they began to go to bed. Once Smart settled in, he couldn’t sleep all night. And his friend fell asleep soundly.
The smart one then fell asleep a little and heard that there was some kind of commotion, noise in the plague or on the street near the plague. Woke up and sat up. And he sees that the seagulls all attacked his comrade and tore him to pieces.
And he sits, cries and says:
- What are you doing, why?
And they say:
- Go, go home, we won’t touch you, because you didn’t do anything bad on the way. And your comrade took fat from the dead, pinched the girls, and so we tore it up and eat it.
So he went home and, apparently, arrived safely.
And that's it, it seems.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru