Week 14 Story: Natasha and Igor

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Natasha looked back and forth between the path into the woods and her village. She hadn’t gotten permission to go into the woods, and she knew that her parents would be upset with her. However, she desperately needed to pick some of the flowers that grew in the little glade. The glade wasn’t very far into the trees. She could be in and out quickly, with no one the wiser. She was the only girl in the village without the flowers to braid into a wreath. Having finally talked herself into disobedience, Natasha stealthily followed the path into the trees.

She hadn’t gotten far before the gray-haired man jumped out at her. Natasha gasped in surprise and stumbled backwards over a log. “You frightened me,” she exclaimed. “Who are you?”

“I am your new master,” the gray-haired man replied. “My name is Igor, and you will come with me now.”

Natasha began to feel light-headed and confused; a disorienting haze had settled over her mind. “I cannot go with you. Please, leave me alone. My father is a priest.” She shook her head in an attempt to clear the sudden cobwebs.

Igor grabbed Natasha’s arm and dragged her deeper into the woods. “Yes, you belong to me now. You will cook my food and clean my home. Your name is only girl now, you have no need to remember your old life. Come, girl. You have work to do.”

Natasha lived with Igor for three years, and forgot her old life in the village. She knew only the drudgery of constant labor and believed her gray-haired master when he told her that she would starve and die without his care. Each day was identical to the one that came before, and time blurred into a irrelevance, with nothing ever changing. Until the day that Igor stumbled into the hut, bloody and dying.

Natasha was crying over Igor’s body, lamenting her fate without a provider to feed her, when a strange man entered the hut. He demanded answers to questions that she didn’t understand, questions that didn’t have an answer. She had no name, other than girl, and she didn’t know where she had come from. She had only every known Igor’s hut.

Confused and afraid, she was dragged by the stranger through the woods to a village. There were so many people in the village and their stares frightened her so terribly. A man and a woman stepped forward and claimed that she was their daughter, but how could such a thing be true? She had no memory of these people and their loud voices frightened her.

The man, who said his name was Anton, claimed to be a priest. He told her that she’d gone missing in the woods three years prior. He and his wife, the woman who claimed to be her mother, took Natasha home and settled her into an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar cottage. Trembling in fear, but finally alone, Natasha fell into a deep sleep that was full of vivid dreams. In her dreams, she was twelve years old and looking down a path into the woods, desperately thinking about flowers for a wreath.

Author's Note: The story, The Leshy, follows a young hunter who finds a missing girl that had been kidnapped by a forest demon. The young girl, the daughter of the local priest, had gone missing in the woods several years prior. One day, while out hunting, the hunter came across a odd looking man sitting on a log and working on a shoe. The hunter asks the man who he is, pointing out that he looked young, but had very gray hair. The odd man introduces himself as the devil's grandfather. The hunter shoots the demon, who runs off into the woods. The hunter follows him and comes across a cleft in a cliff. Inside is a hut, and inside the hut is the body of the now dead demon and the missing girl. He takes the girl back to the village and she's returned to her family. He memory is gone, but begins to return over time. She is eventually married to the hunter that saved her.

I wanted to tell the story from the girl's point of view, giving a little glimpse of what her life was like living with the Leshy and what happened to her memories. I also wanted to provide an explanation for why the young girl had gone into the woods without her parent's permission, and to establish the circumstance of her capture by the Leshy.


Bibliography: Russian Fairy Tales by W.R.S. Ralston. Web source.