“Carry it in the bag. And hang the bag around your neck.”
I put the ring back in the bag. It was made of a strange kind of leather! As thin as a leaf, and if you let it out of your hand, the wind would carry it straight away. But then, a precious ring should have a fine little nest.
“Thank you!” I said, terribly happy. “It’s a really pretty ring!” Meeme laughed.
“You’re welcome, boy,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s beautiful or ugly, but it’s useful. Keep it nicely in the bag like I told you.”
I ran back to the bonfire. Manivald had been burned up by now, only his ashes still smoldered. I showed the ring to Uncle Vootele, and he examined it long and thoroughly.
“It’s a precious thing,” he said at length. “Made in a foreign land and probably reached our shores at one time along with the men of iron. I wouldn’t be surprised if the first owner of this ring was a victim of the Frog of the North. I don’t understand why Meeme chose you to give it to. He could well have sent it to your sister, Salme. What will you do, boy, with an expensive piece of jewelry like that in the forest?”
“I certainly won’t give it to Salme!” I cried, offended.
“No, don’t. Meeme never does anything for no reason. If he gave you the ring, there must be a need for it. Right now I don’t understand his plan, but that doesn’t matter. It’ll all be clear one day. Let’s go home now.”
“Yes, let’s,” I agreed, and realized how sleepy I was. Uncle Vootele lifted me onto a wolf’s back and we went home through the nocturnal forest. Behind us lay the embers of the fire and the sea, no longer watched over by anyone.
Two
n fact I was born in the village, not in the forest. It was my father who decided to move to the village. Everybody was moving, well, almost everybody, and my parents were among the last. That was probably on my mother’s account, because she didn’t like village life; she wasn’t interested in farming and she never ate bread.
“It was slops,” she used to say to me. “You know, Leemet, I don’t believe anybody actually likes it. This bread eating is really just showing off. They want to appear terribly fine and to live like foreigners. But a nice fresh haunch of deer is quite another thing. Now come on and eat, dear child! Who did I roast these joints for?”
My father was obviously of a different opinion. He wanted to be a modern person, and a modern person should live in a village, under the open sky and the sun, not in a murky forest. He should grow rye, work all summer like some filthy ant, so that in autumn he could look important and gobble bread like the foreigners. A modern person was supposed to have a scythe at home, so that in autumn he could stoop down and cut the grain on the ground; he had to have a quern on which to grind the grains, huffing and puffing. Uncle Vootele told me how my father — when he was still living in the forest — would just about explode with irritation and envy when he thought about the interesting life the villagers were leading and the impressive tools they had.
“We must hurry up and move to the village!” he had shouted. “Life is passing us by! These days all normal people live under the open sky, not in the bushes! I want to sow and reap too, as they do everywhere in the developed world! Why should I be any worse? Just look at the iron men and the monks; you can see straight away that they’re a hundred years ahead of us! We must make every effort to catch up with them!”
And so he took my mother to live in the village; they built themselves a little cottage and my father learned to sow and reap and got himself a scythe and a quern. He started going to church and learning German, so he could understand the speech of the iron men and learn even better and more fashionable tricks from them. He ate bread and, smacking his lips, praised its goodness, and as he learned to make proper barley gruel, there was no end to his enthusiasm and pride.
“It tasted like vomit,” my mother confessed to me, but my father ate barley gruel three times a day, screwing up his face a bit, while claiming that it was a particularly dainty dish, for you had to develop a taste. “Not like our hunks of meat, which any fool can gobble, but a proper European food for people with finer tastes!” he would say. “Not too rich, not too fatty, but sort of lean and light. But nourishing! A food for kings!”
When I was born, my father advised that I should be fed only on barley gruel, because his child “has to have the best.” And he got me a sickle, so that as soon as my legs could carry me I would go stooping in the fields with him. “Of course a scythe is a precious thing, and you might think there’s no sense in putting it into a tiny tot’s hands, but I don’t agree with that attitude. Our child ought to get used to modern tools from the start,” he said proudly. “In the future we won’t get by without a scythe, so let him learn the great art of reaping rye straight away!”
All this was related to me by Uncle Vootele. I don’t remember my father. And my mother didn’t like talking about him; every time he came up she would become uneasy and change the subject. She must have blamed herself for my father’s death, and I suppose she was guilty. My mother was bored in the village; she didn’t care for work in the fields, and while my father was striding out to go sowing, my mother was wandering around the old familiar forests, and she got acquainted with a bear. What happened next seems to be quite clear; it’s such a familiar story. Few women can resist a bear; they’re so big, soft, helpless, and furry. And besides that, bears are born seducers, and terribly attracted to human females, so they wouldn’t let slip an opportunity to make their way up to a woman and growl in her ear. In the old days, when most of our people still lived in the forest, there were endless cases of bears becoming women’s lovers, trysts that would ultimately end in the man discovering the couple and sending the brown beast packing.
The bear started visiting us, always when my father was toiling in the field. He was a very friendly animal; my sister, Salme, who is five years older than me, remembers him and has told me that the bear always brought her honey. Like all bears at that time, this bear knew how to talk a little, since bears are the cleverest of animals, of course excepting snakes, the brothers of humans. True, bears couldn’t say much, and their conversation wasn’t very smart — but how smart do you have to be to talk to your lover? At least they could chat nicely about everyday matters.
Of course, everything’s changed now. A couple of times, when carrying water from the spring, I’ve seen bears and shouted a few words of greeting to them. They’ve stared at me with stupid faces and taken off with a crackle into the bushes. That whole stratum of culture they possessed down the long centuries in their dealings with men and snakes has been dissipated in such a short time, and bears have become ordinary animals. Like ourselves. Apart from me, who now knows the snake-words? The world has gone downhill, and even the water from the spring tastes bitter.
But never mind that. In those days, in my childhood, bears were still able to exchange ideas with humans. We were never friends; we considered bears too far below us for that. Ultimately we were the ones they pawed with their honey-paws and pulled at, out of primitive stupidity. In their way they were the pupils of humans, for we were their superiors. And of course we knew the lustfulness of bears, and that incomprehensible attraction that our women felt for them. That was why every man looked on them with a slight suspicion: “That fat furry bundle of love won’t get my woman …” Too often they would find bear fur in their beds.
But things were even worse for my father. He didn’t find only bear fur in the bed; he also found a whole bear. In itself that mightn’t have been so bad; he should have just given the bear a good hiss and the creature, caught in the act, would have slunk off in shame to the forest. But my father had started to forget Snakish, because he didn’t need to speak it in the village, and besides, he didn’t think much of the snake-words, believing that a scythe and a quern would serve him a whole lot better. So when he saw the bear in his own bed, he mumbled some words of German, whereupon the bear — confused by the incomprehensible words, and annoyed at being caught in flagrante—bit his head off.