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melancholy.”
    “Our father, of course, wasn’t killed in battle,” Mother corrected him. “No one would dare go near him, because he had poison teeth.”
    “What do you mean, poison teeth?”
    “Like an adder’s,” explained Uncle Vootele. “Our ancient forefathers all had fangs, but as time passed and they forgot Snakish, their poisonous fangs disappeared. In the last hundred years very few of them have had them, and now I don’t know anybody who has them, but our father did, and he bit his enemies without mercy. The iron men were terribly afraid of him and fled for their lives when Father flashed his fangs at them.”
    “So how was he captured?”
    “They brought a stone-throwing machine,” sighed Mother. “And started firing rocks at him. Finally they got him andstunned him. Then the iron men tied him up, with whoops of joy, cut off his legs, and threw him into the sea.”
    “The iron men hated and feared your grandfather terribly,” said Uncle. “He had a really wild nature, and our ancestors’ fiery blood flowed in him. If we had all stayed like that, the iron men wouldn’t have stood a chance of building a nest in our land; they would have had their throats cut and been gnawed to the bone. But unfortunately people and tribes degenerate. They lose their teeth, forget their language, until finally they’re bending meekly on the fields and cutting straw with a scythe.”
    Uncle Vootele spat and glowered at the floor with such a horrible expression that I thought, My heroic grandfather’s cruel blood hasn’t completely gone from his son.
    “Even amid the waves, Father bellowed in such a frightful voice that the iron men fled to their castle and closed all the window holes,” Mother said, concluding her woeful tale. “That was more than thirty years ago.”
    “So isn’t that reason enough to learn Snakish?” said Uncle. “In memory of your brave grandfather. I can’t plant fangs in your mouth, but I can put a nimble tongue in there. Spit out that pap, and let’s get started again.”
    “Let him rest a little at least,” begged Mother.
    “It’s nothing,” I said, trying to put on a brave face. “And my tongue doesn’t hurt so much anymore. I can do it.”

    It would be wrong to claim that studying Snakish immediately killed all my dreams of a spinning wheel and a bread shovel. I still thought sometimes about the marvels I’d seen at the home of the village elder, Johannes, and his daughter, Magdaleena, andI even secretly tried to fashion a bread shovel myself. I couldn’t even contemplate trying a spinning wheel; that seemed like a contraption from another world that an ordinary person could never make with his own hands. Not even the shovel amounted to much; somehow it ended up crooked and splintered. There was nothing I could do with it. I didn’t dare to take my handiwork home, so it lay abandoned in the bushes.
    With Pärtel, naturally, I reminisced about our visit, and we conferred about whether to visit the exciting house again. Johannes the village elder had invited us back, but the sense of nervousness about the village had not diminished in our hearts, and Mother’s and Uncle’s stories had, at least for me, only strongly increased how alien it seemed. So I resolved to put off another visit to the village for sometime in the future, and Pärtel didn’t want to go alone. I did invite him to join me in learning Snakish with Uncle Vootele, but Pärtel said, screwing up his nose, that his mother was already teaching him, that it was disgustingly difficult, and he certainly wasn’t planning to take extra lessons. So I remained as Uncle Vootele’s only pupil.
    After the first painful weeks, during which my tongue swelled like a mushroom several times, my mouth muscles finally started to get used to the effort, and many of my hisses were beginning to sound sufficiently sibilant. If I had at first studied Snakish words mainly out of obedience and respect for my uncle, whom I