“The Foundling Bird”
One day a mother sat under a tree with her
baby and fell asleep. A bird grabbed the baby, but after hearing a gunshot had
dropped it in the higher branches. The mother woke and ran off looking for her
baby.
The hunter heard the baby, rescued it, and
decided to take it home with him to raise with his daughter Lena. He named the
baby Birdie.
Lena and Birdie were the best of friends,
but the hunter’s cook didn’t like Birdie. One day, Lena saw her carrying in a
bunch of water and asked what she was doing. The cook said that the next day
she was going to boil the water and throw Birdie in it to cook for dinner.
So Lena told Birdie and they ran away
before the cook could get Birdie. The cook wondered what the hunter would say
when he came home and the children weren’t there (wasn’t the plan to kill one
of them?) so she sent some servants to find them.
The girls saw the servants coming, so they
changed into a rose tree and a rose. When the servants went back home, the cook
told them they should have cut off some of the stems and the roses and brought
them back.
The servants went out again and the girls
changed themselves into a church and steeple. When the servants didn’t bring
those back, the cook vowed to go with them the third time.
The third time, the girls transformed into
a pond and a duck. When the cook saw the pond, she bent down to drink it all
up, but the duck grabbed her hair and held her under until she drowned.
And they lived happily ever after.
#
I guess the mother eventually just gave up
looking?
Okay, I haven’t put much thought into
this, but I’m assuming boiling a child alive is probably not the quietest or
most subtle way to kill them. And then serving them for dinner? The story’s
reasoning is as follows: “… the forester had an old cook, who was not fond of
children, and she wanted to get rid of Birdie, who she thought was an
intruder.” That’s it. That was enough to provoke child murder and cannibalism.
Also, shouldn’t the cook – living in the
same household after all – have known that Lena and Birdie were friends? So why
tell Lena that she was going to kill her best friend and serve her for dinner?
What’s more amazing, the kids were able to
transform into amazing things, or that the cook was – apparently – able to know
what they had transformed into from a distance?
That’s not something you see that often:
death by duck.
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