Four tales from the Kolyma country, told in the eighteen nineties and written down by Waldemar Bogoras. Three hunting companions share twenty sable skins unfairly, until the old man by the birch tree — who was once turned into a wolf, and then into a bunch of grass — teaches them what an unfair share costs, and the birch tree beside his house becomes a woman again. The brother who stayed at home catches the Bad Merchant with the merchant's own silver-inlaid lance and sets his workman free. A boatload of sea-wanderers sails three years among wonders — the fox people under the bank, the one-sided fishers, and the people who live on steam — and comes home to wives who had mourned them for dead. And on a Lena-country lake lives a pike so large that its cheek bones once sheltered a man, and the fisherman who met its two eyes on the water would never eat pike again.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters:
01:39 A Hunting Tale
12:38 Story about the Bad Merchant
19:04 Sea-Wanderers
29:13 The Big Pike
Source: Waldemar Bogoras, Tales of Yukaghir, Lamut, and Russianized Natives of Eastern Siberia (1918), recorded for the Jesup North Pacific Expedition — public domain. Narrators as printed: N.123 told by Nicholas Kusakoff, a Russian Creole, at Pokhotsk, summer 1896; N.124 told by Nicholas Kusakoff, a Russian creole, at Pokhotsk, summer 1895; N.126 told by Innocent Korkin, a Russianized Yukaghir man, at Pokhotsk, summer 1896; N.130 told by Nicholas Kusakoff, a Russian creole, at Pokhotsk, summer 1896. Fresh in-house English rendering, heard exactly as screened: the hunting tale and the Big Pike stand whole as printed; in the Bad Merchant, a single sentence of violation and the closing speculation about the prisoners' fate are not carried; in Sea-Wanderers, one island episode — a house with racks of dried human flesh — is left out whole, and the voyage sails on without it. After the first tale and its music you will hear this episode's short spoken break, placed there by design.
Left out of this part, in book order and by name: N.125 Stepmother and Stepdaughter and N.127 The Tale of La'la (first telling) are excluded whole under the shelf's register — the first turns on habitual stepmother cruelty and ends in a girl torn in two; the second is a war raid and revenge killing from first to last. N.128, the second telling of La'la, stands down as its variant and is never narrated — with the first telling excluded, the La'la story leaves the shelf entirely. Also held by name for the owner's ruling, and untouched: N.116 The She-Monster, N.117 The Monster with Iron Teeth, N.118 The Girl from the Grave-Box, N.119 and N.120 Small-Pox (both versions), N.129 The Woman's Head, and N.142 Story of Hungry Children. This part tells Kolyma tales only, and the shelf claims no completeness that its register contradicts.
Music: opening and closing theme, with short separators between the tales — Falling Leaves at the Ice Cliffs.
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