Then of course there was Tambet’s daughter, Hiie. She was bigger now — no longer falling on her bottom after every step — and we would have been glad to accept her into our gang. But she wasn’t allowed. Hiie’s father, Tambet, was simply that sort of man. For a start he didn’t approve of me, because I was born in the village and Tambet thought it wasn’t right for his daughter to play with a boy like that. Second he thought there was no need to play at all; one should do work.
Tambet was the sort of person who stubbornly refused to admit a fact that was evident to everyone — namely that the forest was almost empty and was destined to get ever emptier. He was always rambling on about some Estonian Golden Age, when all the peoples of the world trembled before our Frog of the North, and the woods were full of wild hissing men, who rode on wolves’ backs and swilled their nutritious milk. He still kept a hundred wolves in his barn, milked them, and trained them, without grasping that for a long time past there had not been enough people in the forest to ride on such beasts, just as there was nobody who would drink up those huge amounts of wolves’ milk. Other people had been reducing their flocks of wolves and letting the animals out into the forest — for why would a lone old woman keep dozens of wolves if she didn’t have a single child or grandchild? One animal to milk would be enough for her. But that was not what Tambet did; he did the opposite. He regarded letting wolves go free into the forest as an unprecedented act of treachery, a betrayal of an age-old way of life.
“In our forefathers’ day, not a single wolf ran free around the forest,” he would say indignantly. “They all stayed in their barns, milked and ready to carry people.” Tambet was not interested in the fact that no one went to war any longer; he did not seem to understand that, and sometimes seemed to regard real life as just a thick fog that leads fools astray, one through which only he could clearly see. He was absolutely sure that this fog would soon lift, and then people would start living as they had once done. Therefore he would not reduce his pack of wolves, but on the contrary increased it, catching whole groups of wolves, which he said were not created to trot around the forest with their tails up, but to serve men. Naturally looking after such a herd of wolves took up enormous time and effort, and that was one reason why Hiie did not manage to slip out and play with us. She had to milk the wolves and throw food to them, even though she was only a child. My mother thought this was terribly cruel, and often came home cursing Tambet and his wife for torturing their daughter with such hard work.
“Today I came past Tambet’s place and I saw poor little Hiie killing hares,” she said. “It’s a terrible pity to look at her. A great number of hares had been driven into the corner of the yard, frozen in the spot by Snakish words, and little Hiie was just chopping off their heads with an ax. And you’d think that Tambet would give her a nice little ax, but no. The ax was bigger than the child! Hiie is so tiny; she could scarcely lift the great whopping thing! She chopped and chopped, tears in her eyes from the great strain. When they were all chopped off, she started throwing the hares in front of the wolves. Now why would anyone need to keep so many of those great strapping wolves in the barn? Let them trot around the forest and find their own food! That Tambet is a heartless man, and downright crazy! He tortures his own child. And that Mall is even madder. What kind of mother is she, letting her own daughter do a slave’s work! I wouldn’t let anyone torment my child like that! If my husband forced you to chop up hares like that, I’d have a good chop at him myself on the …”
At this point Mother fell silent, because she recalled her own sinful love with a bear, and how my father was left without his own head, and she grew embarrassed. But it was true that Tambet and Mall took very little care of their daughter. For them the most important thing was to live as their forefathers had. As if the sun had stopped moving in the sky, ceased setting and rising, as if the forest had not been drained of people in the meantime and the whole world had not changed. In the name of leaving that impression, they would sacrifice everything. They would work till the blood ran out of their nails, and force their own daughter to do the same.
Hiie had another problem too, apart from having to feed wolves all day long and chop up hares with a big ax. She didn’t drink wolves’ milk — and that was extremely bad, in Tambet’s opinion. Think of the pack of wolves squatting in the barn, lactating rivers! What was to be done with all that milk? Naturally it had to be drunk, and every family member had to make a contribution. Apart from that purely practical reason, Tambet was deeply convinced that every true Estonian ought to drink wolves’ milk; it was wolves’ milk that had given our forefathers and foremothers their boundless strength. So refusing wolves’ milk was a terrible crime, a betrayal of old customs, and in Tambet’s opinion nothing was more heinous.
But what was most unpleasant was that such resistance was taking place in his own family. It had to be overcome! Milk was forced into Hiie’s mouth, but when the girl began to vomit, Tambet’s face went red and he yelled like a roebuck. He couldn’t think of any new punishments for Hiie; he had tried everything, but the girl just cried and asked to be allowed to give up the milk. Tambet would not hear of it, and his wife, Mall, banged the table with her long sturdy finger and demanded: “Do as your father says!”
Finally Tambet went to talk with the sage of the sacred grove, thinking that he should be able to help. Ülgas examined Hiie, smoked a few plants around her, smeared her knees with martens’ blood, and commanded the girl to suck on the brain of a live nightingale. When her disgust at that made Hiie vomit all over again, Ülgas declared to Tambet that the sprites had bewitched the girl.
“But don’t worry. I have power over the sprites and I’ll make her well again!” promised Ülgas. Hiie had to go to the sacred grove every day, and the martens’ blood flowed in streams, the stinking smoke of the plants rose to the skies, and Ülgas kept stuffing more and more nightingales’ brains under the girl’s nose.
None of this helped. Hiie still couldn’t drink wolves’ milk. Actually she could hardly eat at all anymore, for the nightingales’ brains had driven away all her appetite, and the suffocating smell of Ülgas’s spells stayed in her nostrils and made every kind of food horrible. Ülgas became angry, because he had promised to subjugate the sprites and tried to feed Hiie in new, even more disgusting ways. He took the girl at night deep into the forest to a lonely spring and left her alone with a tub of milk, assuring the girl that at midnight a sprite would rise up out of the spring and strangle her if she had not drunk up the milk by then. Hiie didn’t drink it, but poured it onto the moss, and of course no sprite came up out of the spring.
Finally Ülgas got tired of Hiie’s fussing and told Tambet that he had freed the child from the sprites’ spell, but the girl would only start drinking milk in ten years’ time; that was how long the sprites’ curse on her would last. Obviously Ülgas hoped that in ten years’ time Hiie would be drinking milk for some reason, or had died anyway by then, or even that Tambet had died by then, and the fulfillment of the sage’s promise could not be verified. After all, ten years is a long time, and anything can happen in that interim.