The curse

That tribe had the most cattle and they were the strongest. They crossed mountains no eagle could fly over. They carried the cattle on their shoulders over crevasses and snow. People said no other tribe possessed the force to harm them. And it was true. The only force that could harm them lay deep within each member of that tribe.

The tribe knew of their fame. They took pride in their name. They recognized all members of their tribe, but shared their hearths only with close kin. They travelled far to keep the rest of the tribe beyond the mountain ridges, so that the pastures they discovered belonged to their families only.

But as they were of the same blood, the same places called out to them. One morning they all woke up gathered around the same lake. Round and bright, the lake shone like the sun itself while snowy mountain peaks looked down upon them, high and unreachable like gods.

Each family felt chosen by the lake. They were about to start fighting over it, when they discovered they had fewer cows than the day before. Together, they searched for their missing cattle in the nearby forest and on the mountain trails, but found no traces. From a mountaintop, the soil around the lake looked rough, as if something had ploughed through it. The gigantic claw marks ran to the lake. Something must have crawled out of the lake at night to steal their cows.

The tribe held their first meeting in centuries. Together, they came up with a plan to get rid of the monster. Together they felled nearby trees. Together they rolled the trunks towards the mountains. They worked shoulder to shoulder, and as they placed the trunks along the mountain wall, nobody cared whose family the shoulder nearby belonged to.

By sunset they had set the trees on fire. The mountain wall glowed, humming with heat. The people hammered at the rocks, crushing the mountain wall and rolling the scorching stones into the lake. Soon, the water in the lake bubbled and boiled.

That was when it flew out of the water – the monster they were fighting. Some said it looked like a demon, others called it a dragon. The monster dropped a shiny object. It could have been its jewelry or a piece of scale. Later, no two families told the same story.

As the monster soared into the sky, it spoke.

“I’m cursing you to never again work shoulder to shoulder,” it said.

Those words were the only thing the tribe agreed about.

As the monster disappeared behind the clouds, the lake stopped bubbling and everything became quiet, the tribespeople shrugged – the curse didn’t seem dangerous enough.

But when they started discussing what had happened, each had their own version. They disagreed, they started fighting; about the story first, but then they fought about the lake. Nobody wanted to leave the place or live there together. The fights got violent. Some tribe members had to flee, fearing the revenge from others. Hiding, they joined different tribes. They travelled far from the lake. As years went by, fewer and fewer people called themselves by the tribe’s name, until eventually the name left the world of living and entered legends.

A tiny salamander in the lake watched centuries go by as tribes came, changed, dissolved and only the salamander remained, shiny like a piece of jewelry or a dragon’s scale.

This piece of writing is based on different legends about Bukumirsko Lake in Montenegro.