Thing I wrote

Here's a fake folk tale which I wrote for and performed at No-Shame Theater in Iowa City, reprinted here for the benefit of the people who read my blog, consisting of Bob and maybe my brothers:



On the coast of the Baltic Sea in the middle ages there was a place called Livonia, which is today the countries of Latvia and Estonia. There was a village in Livonia, where lived a girl named Kadri. Kadri was very pretty. Some said that she was the most beautiful girl in all the lands around the Baltic Sea. This would have been much to her good if she had not known of her beauty, but in fact she knew very well and never hesitated to exploit her charms to her benefit. She kept her parents’ heart-strings wrapped round her finger and they spoiled her as few children have ever been spoiled. She broke all the rules and treated all the other children very cruelly, but everyone tolerated her bad behavior because she was so beautiful.

Then as now, Livonia was a country of swamps and deep forests which lay only a few hundred feet beyond any village. Kadri was playing near there one day, when she looked up and saw a miraculous deer in the wood, which was all white with golden antlers, and its eyes were red as blood. She hurried back to her house and told her parents what she had seen, and she told her father, who was a hunter in the village, that he should go and kill the white deer for her, that she might have its pelt for a cloak.

Kadri’s father knew that such miraculous animals belonged to the druids, who were people in those days who had not become Christians, and instead kept to the old ways and lived in the woods practicing pagan magic. It was said among the people of the villages, that if a man went hunting after what belonged to the druids it would be him who was killed and eaten, his skin made into a drum and his skull into a drinking cup. He told Kadri that he would not go and hunt the white deer, but she screamed and yelled and held her breath ‘til she turned blue, until finally he agreed to go into the forest. He took his crossbow and went out each day, saying that he would hunt the deer she had seen, but he lied and instead hunted the other animals, which did not belong to the druids.

Finally, after several weeks, Kadri realized what her father was really doing, and she said that she would go with her father into the forest to make sure that he would catch the miraculous deer. He tried to tell her that she could not, and he made excuses like that she would frighten away the deer anyway, but she screamed and yelled and held her breath, and he gave in, and they went into the woods together.

Now it happened that the hunter had not been alone in the woods, and that the whole time he had been pretending to hunt the deer, there had been a druid following him to see what he did. Now when the druid saw Kadri, who as I told you was very beautiful, he thought that she would be good to eat. So he cast his magic on the father, who fell into a deep sleep, and he grabbed up Kadri and dragged her back to his cottage deep in the forest.

Kadri kicked and screamed and yelled, but no one heard her in the woods, and the druid paid no mind. But when he finally got her home, he poked and prodded at her flesh, and smelled her, and he realized that for as good as she looked, she would taste very foul, like a red shiny apple which has rotted all away inside. The druid asked Kadri what she thought he should do with her.

Kadri, who was so spoiled that she did not even think of the danger she was in, said that she wanted the white deer’s pelt for her cloak. Now it happened that the white deer was actually the druid himself, because such people had the power to take on the forms of miraculous animals. He was very offended by the presumption of this awful little girl, but he said that she would indeed have the cloak she wanted. He waved his magic wand and said a few words in the old language, which the village people like Kadri could no longer speak, and in an eyeblink she had turned into a white hind—that is, a female deer—with just such a snowy pelt as she had asked for. The druid then set her free, and in the shape of this doe she ran back to where he father lay, still sleeping.

It happened that she arrived at just the moment her father awoke, and seeing this white-pelted hind, he raised his crossbow and shot it dead. He hauled the carcass back to the village, where it was skinned and gutted and boned, the meat salted and smoked for the winter, and the pelt made into a cloak so beautiful that the Khan of the Golden Horde, which was a wealthy country far to the Southeast, bought it himself for one hundred gold pieces, this being far more than the worth of the entire village put together.

And no one ever saw Kadri again.

The moral of this story is that parents who spoil their children will only harm them in the end, and also that people should not covet the things that belong to others.