The New Fairy-Tales Of Kamchatka

There lived one girl - an orphan. She had no relatives left. Her father had been carried away on ice to the sea, and her mother died soon after girl's birth. The only thing left from mother was a song, which she had been singing by the cradle. Once the girl began to starve. But there was no place to go to. She climbed to the roof of the dugout and started to sing the song from her childhood. Immediately after the end of the song, an exhalation of a whale sounded far in the sea. The girl started the song again. The whale's exhalation sounded nearer. The girl sang the song for the third time. The whale's breathing got very near. And when the song began for the fourth time, the whale swam up to the shore and leaned his head on the steep shore-rock. A man came out of the whale and said: "What is the use of your sitting on the shore and looking to the sea, while all your relatives are of the whales' kind?" He said that and took the girl with him to the sea. Nobody has seen her on the shore since then, but sometimes people hear whales' songs sounding like those of the seaside.

©Marina Fandee