Spellbound Pilgrim

Our small house had been covered with snow. The spring solar rays on the roof had created something like a mountain glacier from underneath which as though it were the true glacier water streamed in abundance, and for that reason the glacier receded. From the warm roof a trickle falls on the icy icicle hanging in a shade in the cold. Because of it water having touched an icicle is freezing, and so the icicle grows on the top in thickness in the morning. When having turned round the roof the sun had glanced on the icicle, I also had looked at it out of a small window: the frost had disappeared, and a stream out of the glacier, having run down the icicle, began to fall by the golden drops downwards.

Long before the evening it began to freeze in the shade outside and though on the roof the glacier kept receding and also the rill kept on streaming down the icicle, nevertheless some droplets on the tip of the icicle began to freeze, and the further, the more. The icicle by the evening began to grow in length. Next day the sun shines again, and the glacier recedes again, and the icicle grows in thickness in the morning, and in length in the evening: every day it becomes more thicker and more longer.

The spring sun shone in the sky, but the woods were still as in the winter full of snow. Have you ever been in a snowy winter in the young forest? Certainly you haven’t: it is impossible even to enter there. There, where in the summer you went on a wide path, now through this path in the one and the other side the bent trees lie so low that if only a hare can run under them.

Here is what actually happened with the trees: the little birch-tree’s top as if with the palm of hand was picking up the falling snow, and because of it such a snow clod had grown that the top of the tree began to bend. In the thaw it snowed again and the falling snow was sticking to that clod. The top with the huge clod kept on bending and at last had plunged into the snow lying on the ground and had frozen to in that position till the spring. Under this arch all the winter long there passed animals and people occasionally on skis.

But I know one simple magical trick so that to go on such path, without bending my back. I break off for myself a good weighty stick, and I only have to knock properly on the inclined tree as snow falls downwards, the tree jumps upwards and lets me pass. In such manner slowly but surely I go setting free with the magical blows a lot of trees.

It thaws in the fields, but in the woods still snow lies untouched in the form of the compact pads on the earth and on the branches of trees as well as the trees are there in the captivity of snow. Only their bent down to the ground slim trunks have frozen to and wait for their freeing at any moment. This instant which is happiest for the motionless trees and the terrible one for the animals and the birds is coming at last.

The rush time has come, snow imperceptibly melts, and here in the absolute silence of forest as if by itself the fur-tree’s bough moves and begins to shake. But it is just under this fur-tree the covered with its large boughs a hare is sleeping. In fear it gets up listening…

The hare is scared, and here right in front of its nose the second bough as well as the third one moves and having been got free from snow jumps up. The hare leaps back, takes a run, sits again like a little column in listening: whence comes a trouble?, where is to run?

And only it has risen on its hind legs, only it has looked back, as all of a sudden the birch-tree jumps upwards before its nose, straightens and shakes, and then the fur-tree waves with its bough as if by the hand quite unexpectedly right beside it!

Here’s a go: branches and boughs everywhere jump being released from the snow captivity, the whole forest moves in the vicinity, the whole forest has been aroused.

The mad hare keeps rushing about, also the every sort of animal rouses, and the every kind of bird flies away from the woods.