Baba Iaga came home one evening — so tired — and she gathered her little family around her, the pelican child and the dog and the cat and said, My dear ones, I still have magic and power unrealized. Do you wish to become human beings, for some think you are under a hellish spell. Do you want to become human? The cat and the dog spoke. The pelican child had not spoken since the day of her return.
No, the dog and the cat said.
When I was doing some research for a book on the Florida Keys some twenty years ago, I discovered that John James Audubon, despite his revered status, was a great slaughterer of birds. (Perhaps everyone was aware of this.) He killed tirelessly for pleasurable sport and would wipe out entire mangrove islands of its inhabitants because. well, because I guess it was easy once he got started. I do hope the curse of history will catch up with him. Perhaps Baba Iaga will be the great facilitator in that regard.
Some linguists posit that the baba component of her name derives from pelican. And the pelican is one of the great birds of legend. Returning to her nest to find her infants dead, she pierces her own breast and revives them with her blood.
Baba Iaga is the most marvelous creature in all of Russian folklore and totally unpredictable in her behavior. In this story, she becomes kind and sorrowful, even, perhaps, tragic.
JONATHON KEATS. Ardour
YOU MEET FOLKS WHO REMEMBER WHEN THIS COUNTRY STILL HAD A winter, and one year led into another unhindered. Come the first snow, men would leave the fields for fallow, to chop firewood in the forest. Then not more than a day would go by before you’d hear that one of them had seen her.