The Man Who Spoke Snakish Read Online Free PDF Page A

be finer things than spinning wheels and bread shovels. We would have liked to see them! We should really talk our parents into letting us spend at least some time in the village, just to look at all these marvels.
    “What are your names?” asked the man.
    We mumbled our names. The man patted us on the shoulders.
    “Pärtel and Leemet—those are heathen names. When you come to live in the village, you’ll be christened, and you’ll get names from the Bible. For instance, my name used to be Vambola, but for many years now I’ve had the name Johannes. And my daughter’s name is Magdaleena. Isn’t that beautiful? Names from the Bible are all beautiful. The whole world uses them, the fine boys and pretty girls from all the great peoples. Us too—the Estonians. The wise man does as other wise men do, and doesn’t just run around berserk like some piglet let out of a pen.”
    Johannes patted us on the shoulder once more and led us into the yard.
    “Now go home and talk to your parents. And come back soon. All Estonians have to come out of the dark forest, into the sun and the open wind, because those winds carry the wisdom of distant lands to us. I’m an elder of this village. I’ll be expecting you. And Magdaleena will be expecting you too; it would be nice to play with you and go to church on Sunday to pray to God. Till we meet again, farewell, boys! May God protect you!”
    Obviously something was troubling Pärtel; he opened his mouth a few times, but didn’t dare utter a sound. Finally, when we really did turn to leave, he couldn’t contain his question any longer: “What is that long stick in your hand? And all those spikes in it!”
    “It’s a rake!” replied Johannes with a smile. “When you come to live in the village, you can have one of these!”
    Pärtel’s face broke into a smile of joy. We ran into the forest.
    For a little while we ran together, then we each scurried off to our own homes. I rushed into the shack, as if someone were chasing me, in the certain knowledge that now I would make it clear to my mother: life in the village was much more interesting than in the forest.
    Mother wasn’t at home. Nor was Salme. Only Uncle Vootele was sitting in a corner, nibbling on some dried meat.
    “What happened to you?” he asked. “Your face is on fire.”
    “I went to the village,” I replied and told him rapidly, gabbling, and sometimes losing my voice with excitement, about everything I had seen in Johannes’s house.
    Uncle Vootele did not change his expression on hearing all these marvels, even though I drew a rake for him on the wall with a piece of charcoal.
    “I’ve seen a rake, yes,” he said. “It’s no use to us here.”
    This seemed to me unbelievably stupid and old-fashioned. How? If something as crazily exciting as a rake has been invented, then it’s definitely of use! Magdaleena’s father Johannes is using it, after all!
    “He might really need it, because you can scrape hay together with a rake,” explained Uncle Vootele. But they need to cultivate hay so that their animals won’t die of hunger in winter.We don’t have that problem. Our deer and goats can fend for themselves in winter; they look for their own food in the forest. But the villagers’ animals don’t go out in winter. They’re afraid of the cold and anyway they’re so stupid that they might get lost in the forest and the villagers would never find them again. They don’t know Snakish, so they can’t summon living beings to them. That’s why they keep their animals all winter penned in and feed them with the hay they’ve gone to great trouble to collect in the summer. You see that’s why the villagers need that ridiculous rake, but we get by very well without it.”
    “But what about the spinning wheel!” The wheel had left a more powerful impression on me than the rake. All those skeins and wheels and other whirring fiddly bits were to my mind so magnificent that it wasn’t possible to describe