Page 32 - Растения Сахалинской области в легендах и мифах

In old days near an Ine village there lived a beautiful shaman
girl. The gods and the village people loved her. She was of help

to everybody there, doctoring people and animals, and singing
beautiful songs to the gods. The gods listened to her songs, rested
in the heavens and filled the village with fish and animals.
Once a beast came to the forest. It devoured sixty bears and sixty

mama bears; small animals and birds melted away. The beast’s breath
blackened the forest, making it lapse into deep slumber. There
is the beast sitting, head to the clouds. Anger gripped it, not a
crumb left. Its stomach is growling. It rolls its huge eyes, looking

for something to eat. Suddenly the beautiful shaman girl catches its
eye. Sitting inside her house, she is throwing the dice, mixing sorrows
and joys in the bowls and winding the balls of life. «Hey there, this
night I’m gonna steal your soul and have fun», the beast thinks.

The shaman girl saw what had happened to the forest, but she wasn’t
scared. She opened a box and took out three balls of string. She tied
round the old river stone and there sprang up an invisible wall. The
girl then tied round the tree near the house and there, among the trees,

appeared the like invisible walls. She tied round a bird’s wing and an
invisible barrier blocked the sky.
The beast wants to go further into the forest but it fails. It tries the
river way and fails again. To go up to the sky is not available either. It

yells, furious, «I know who is in my way. You wouldn’t get away with
it!» But the shaman girl won’t listen to it. She hears the earth and
herbs, and storms, and wild birds speaking. When night falls down,
she climbs up the Frog mountain, makes a fire and begins to pray to

the gods, pleading them to help overpower the beast.
It took her six nights to talk to the gods. During six days she was
fixing the forest, planting new seeds, listening to the voice of the wind
and completing the circle of the Sun.
As for the beast, it spent all those days and nights on casting a spell
and finally it made it. The shaman girl’s spell was broken. Here is
the beast, walking through the forest, growling. On seeing the fire

on the mountain, it is heading there. The fox deity, the bravest one,
ran to the shaman girl the other way, unseen by the beast. It
reached the Frog mountain with the shaman girl on tops and said,
«I’ve known you for years. You’ve always been of good help to
the animals, no one been refused help. We, foxes, have also been

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