A man had a wife and she was a witch. As soon as the dead of midnight comes, he wakes up, and his wife is not near him, he looks around, the hut is locked on a hook, the porch is locked, but she is not there. He thinks to himself: “Let me track it down.”
I pretended to be asleep once and waited until midnight. The wife stood up, illuminated the kaganets, took a bottle of some medicine from the shelf, took a shard, poured it from the bottle of that medicine, poured in soot, stirred it, put in sulfur and vitriol, threw off her shirt, put it on the bed, covered it in a row, and she anointed herself with a washcloth from the shard under her armpits, and flew out through the mouth stove into the chimney.
The man got up, smeared it on his armpits, and he also flew out after her. She flies, and he follows her. They had already flown past all the villages and towns and began to fly up to Kyiv, just in time for Bald Mountain. A man looks, and there is a church, next to the church there is a cemetery, and in the cemetery there are countless witches and witchers, each with a candle, and the candles are still burning.
The witch looked around, saw her husband flying after her, she said to him:
-Why are you flying? You see how many witches there are, when they see you and won’t let you breathe, they’ll tear you to shreds.
Then she gave him a white horse and said:
- Get this horse on you, and ride home quickly!
“He mounted his horse and instantly found himself at home. He placed him at the manger, and he himself entered the hut and went to bed. In the morning he wakes up, and lo and behold, his wife is lying next to him. Then he went to see the horse. He came, and in the place where he tied the horse, a large willow with peeled bark was stuck near the hay. He entered the hut and told his wife that instead of a horse there was only one thing.
“Take,” says the wife, “this little thing and hide it in the barn under the shed, otherwise when the witches see it, you will be in grief, and at night get up and throw it over the threshold, then nothing will happen.” He went to bed the next night, and at midnight he woke up and went to the barn. And as soon as he threw the willow over the threshold, it suddenly became a horse and rattled its hooves, thundered down the street, and who knows where he disappeared to.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru