Читать книгу Vietnamese Legends - George F. Schultz - Страница 13

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THE BUFFALO BOY AND THE BANYAN TREE

COUI WAS of a very, very poor family. He had no education and the only job he could get was that of buffalo boy for a rich farmer. Every day he would look after the water buffaloes in the rice fields, prepare food for the pigs, and collect firewood in the forest. For these tasks the farmer gave him food and clothing and enough money to live on.

One day, while gathering wood in the forest far from home, Cuoi came upon a tiger cub that was frolicking in the sun. He picked up the cub intending to have some sport with it. As he did so, he heard a frightful growl from a nearby thicket. It was the mother of the cub, who had momentarily left her little one to search for game. Cuoi threw the cub to the ground and scrambled in terror up into the sheltering branches of the nearest tree. A moment later the tigress came crashing through the underbrush and growled ferociously as she saw the motionless body of her dead offspring; for Cuoi, in his haste to escape, had thrown the cub to the ground with such force it had been killed.

Up in the tree, Cuoi held his breath, for he knew that he could expect the worst. But then a strange thing happened. The tigress walked to a nearby stream and gathered the leaves from a certain banyan tree. She chewed them into a pulp which she then applied to the head of the dead cub. Immediately the young tiger jumped to its feet and ran about as if nothing had happened.

When the tigress and her cub had disappeared, Cuoi let himself down from his refuge and made his way to the miraculous banyan tree. He gathered a handful of leaves and took them with him. On the way home he came upon a dead dog lying by the side of the road. Cuoi then chewed the leaves into a pulp, as he had seen the tigress do, and applied them to the dog's head. After a few minutes the animal was restored to life; it jumped to its feet and bounded away. Cuoi realized that the leaves of the banyan tree had the miraculous power to restore the dead to life. So he uprooted the tree, dragged it home, and replanted it in the middle of his yard. He also warned his mother never to throw refuse or dirty water where the tree was planted.

"Otherwise," he said jokingly, "the tree will fly away to the sky."

Cuoi's mother paid no attention to this admonition and continued to throw rubbish at the very spot where her son had requested her not to. One day the tree began to slowly pull itself from the soil and to fly up into the sky.

Somehow Cuoi's joke was coming true!

Returning from his chores, Cuoi saw the tree floating away and ran after it in great haste and grasped its roots. But his slight weight was not sufficient to bring the tree down to earth again. Instead, he was carried with it into the sky.

After many days of travel Cuoi and the tree reached a strange new world where there was a permanent calm. It was the Moon. Cuoi planted the tree there and sat down to figure a way out of his terrible predicament; but there was no solution. There on the Moon he has sat waiting, year in and year out, even until today.

The children of Vietnam say that on certain nights, in the curve of the moon, they can see the lone image of Cuoi seated at the foot of a banyan tree. They maintain that sometimes he even turns his head to look at them and smile. They then wave to him and sing:

"Cuoi, Cuoi, the dream-time boy,

Alone, alone, on the Moon;

Playing with the stars in the lost twilight

Until late has become soon."