This legend is about why the Tofalars live in the Sayan Mountains.
“It was a long time ago,” the old men say, puffing on their pipes. - Quite a long time ago. When we were very little, the old people didn’t remember. When they didn’t go hunting, the old people didn’t remember either. That's how long ago it was. There is Sopi Mountain near Upper Gutara. All the mountains were like that back then. If you look at the top, you could break your neck! Along the river, along Biryusa, there is a cedar tree, unprecedented and unheard of - all covered in cones, like the fur on an animal. Back then there was cedar like this everywhere. The smartest person would not have been able to count the squirrel in a hundred years. Oh, there were a lot of squirrels!
And the Tofalars in those distant times lived in a completely different place, where there were no mountains or taiga. They lived freely and happily until a white king appeared in this world. He treated the small people as ruthlessly and cruelly as the Kazyr River treats newcomers on its rapids. And the Tofalars could not stand it. One day, covered with a huge skin of night, they went into the mountains, where no person had ever been and where trees fell to the ground only from old age. They tamed the deer and began to beat the beast, learned to fish and shoot a squirrel. While hunting, they sang songs, and in the evenings in yurts they told each other fairy tales. The songs were about high gloomy mountains and about the dense taiga, which the sun cannot warm, about hard-working deer and about the moss on which they feed, about the evil winter and the hospitable summer - about everything that the Tofalars encountered in life, and all this was often sung in one song, because it had no end. And in fairy tales, even if evil people acted, it was not for long, and they had a bad time, because in the mountains, rising up for many hundreds of kilometers, there are very few well-trodden paths and it is impossible to separate good and evil on them.
But the free life of the Tofa Lars did not last long. The white king's people came to the mountains and found a small people there. The Tofalars had to pay yasak again, heavy as a stone on the neck of a drowned man, and endless, like the Sayan taiga. But there was nowhere to run further, and the Tofalars remained forever in the Sayans.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru