Andrus Kivirähk - The Man Who Spoke Snakish

“It’s our own stone, not some foreign iron,” they said. “When you take a stone like this in your hand, it gives you strength, massages your palms, and calms your nerves. In the olden days, with these stone axes you did all the work; you were in a good mood and nobody got upset.”

Unlike Tambet, who also held sacred the ways of his ancestors and tried steadfastly to walk their well-worn paths, Pirre and Rääk were very mild. They didn’t demand anything of anyone. They didn’t want other people to bare their bottoms, and they never quarreled when they saw someone with a knife in their belt or a brooch on their jacket. If anyone had visited Tambet carrying a piece of bread, he might have set his wolves on that person as punishment for their impertinence, or at least cursed such a village lickspittle in the strongest terms. Pirre and Rääk, on the other hand, never spoke ill of anybody. They were friendly and hospitable, and were not offended even when a visitor declined to eat the half-cooked hunk of meat they offered them. “Well, you’re not used to it,” they would say kindly and laugh, their yellow fangs glistening. “You eat burned food. Doesn’t matter. How about we char this bit of meat till it’s black for you, if you like it better that way. But it isn’t healthy for you. The olden people all ate half-cooked meat; it’s good for the digestion. You don’t want any grubs? What a waste; they used to be our people’s favorite delicacy! Look, you take a grub, squeeze it empty onto your tongue. Mm! Delicious!”

They screwed up their eyes with pleasure and licked the grub mash off their lips, and yet their display of ecstatic enjoyment didn’t ever convince me to taste this delicacy. Pirre and Rääk didn’t impose their preferences on me, though. They roasted my piece of meat blackish brown and wished me a good appetite, laughing sunnily. Then they let me eat in peace, while they combed through each other’s hairs and picked out spruce needles, ants, and spiders.

Even as a little boy I had visited Pirre and Rääk now and then, at first with Uncle Vootele, later alone or with Pärtel. But while searching for the Frog of the North I got to know the Primates better. A couple of times I even stayed the night with them, when an all-day hike through the forest had worn me out, and I didn’t have the strength to go home in the evening. My mother knew that nothing could happen to me in the forest, because I already knew the Snakish words well, and thanks to them I had nothing to fear. So she didn’t worry if I didn’t turn up at home for the night. Sometimes I slept at Ints’s snake nest, sometimes at Uncle Vootele’s place. But lately I had liked being at the Primates’ home, because there were lice there.

Pirre and Rääk were breeding them.

Lice were their pets. The Primates had no children, so they directed all their tenderness and care to lice. The lice lived in specially built cages; there were plenty of them and a whole range of sizes and shapes. There were quite ordinary gray lice, but also frog-sized ones, creatures that were specially bred and fed, which Pirre and Rääk would sometimes take in their laps and stroke with their hairy hands. Most interesting of all, all these lice obeyed their masters. As I have said, insects don’t generally understand Snakish words. You can talk to an ant as much as you like; you will make no headway. A grasshopper disturbing your sleep with its chirping will crackle into song regardless of your having repeatedly yelled words of Snakish at it that would have immediately struck any other creature dumb. It isn’t possible to make a spider or a ladybird understand Snakish; they are born idiots. Lice are also actually extremely obtuse creatures that would normally never obey your will. All the more remarkable, then, that Pirre and Rääk had trained them up like clever fighting wolves.

The lice did exactly what their master and mistress commanded. They would approach closer, lie down, get into line, climb on each other’s backs, roll along the ground like fox cubs. If you stretched out a hand to them, they would politely offer you a paw.

All of these tricks they would do only at Pirre’s and Rääk’s command. If I tried to force them to do anything, they wouldn’t move a muscle. I was very disappointed, because I knew I spoke Snakish very well, no worse than the Primates did. When I asked Pirre and Rääk why they didn’t comprehend my Snakish words, the Primates laughed heartily.

“Ordinary Snakish words aren’t enough,” they said. “Listen carefully to the way we speak to them; we pronounce Snakish in the old Primate way. Long ago, when our ancestors were still living in caves and didn’t know fire, they had power over insects. How else would they have survived the attacks of the gadflies and mosquitoes that could freely get at them, without campfire smoke to scare them away? Nowadays their ancient pronunciation has been forgotten. Even we can’t speak it as they did tens of thousands of years ago. Of all the insects, we can only communicate with lice, which have lived in the fur of animals for a long time and learned a few things from them. But it’s beyond our powers even to scare away blackflies. It’s sad that the old skills die out.”

It was a pity for me too, because I myself would have liked to keep mosquitoes and gadflies away from me using Snakish. They were disgusting creatures and they bit painfully. Now I was trying to at least learn how to talk to the lice, but it was too hard a nut to crack. No matter how much I practiced, I just couldn’t pronounce the Snakish words like Pirre and Rääk. The difference was minute, but whether I liked it or not, my tongue slipped back into the old furrow.

Pirre and Rääk said I shouldn’t bother myself, since it wasn’t possible to learn Primate pronunciation.

“It must be inborn, just as your forefathers had inborn fangs,” they told me. “You can sharpen your teeth as much as you like, and rinse your mouth with any sort of infusion, but your teeth won’t ever become poisonous. That’s how it is with our language. You are not a Primate. Our families are related, yes, but our ways parted long, long ago. You don’t have a tail, either.”

Indeed I did not have a tail, unlike Pirre and Rääk, who had a soft little bulge growing out of their behinds. So I no longer tried talking to the lice, and only wanted to know whether they were able to command only their own trained lice, or whether they could manage with an unfamiliar louse as well.

“We think we could,” replied Pirre and Rääk. Incidentally, they always spoke together, one saying one word, the other the next, so it wasn’t possible to understand with which Primate you were talking. In fact it wasn’t possible to imagine them apart; they were always together, moving around side by side, and sitting clinging to each other. I don’t know whether this was from their great love, or whether hanging on to each other is simply a Primate habit. Apart from Pirre and Rääk I didn’t know any other Primates. There probably weren’t any. They were the last of their kind.

In any case, I sought out a bear in the forest, and asked him to give me a louse. The bear agreed happily. At the time he was skulking around the home of a friend of my sister’s, and I had a sneaking suspicion they had an assignation, because bears simply can’t keep away from girls. This bear must have had some affair going on with my sister’s friend, but that wasn’t my business. As long as he didn’t trouble my sister. I took some lice from the bear and left him sitting under a bush.

A bear like that, on the prowl for a woman, may sit patiently in one place for several days, without eating or drinking, his head cocked, his paws meekly on his belly, and a silly lovesick expression on his face. It makes a huge impression on a girl. “Oh, what a sweet teddy!” they sigh tenderly, and the bear, having managed to create the desired impression, gets to his feet and shambles awkwardly over to his beloved, a globeflower picked from a meadow in his teeth. And when he has continued to show his skill by weaving a dandelion wreath and putting it on his own half-cocked head, then not a single woman can resist such an idyllic scene.