Life is Just a Bowl of... Raspberries?

Mid-July came on chilly and with rain to spare, but month’s end was suddenly dry and warm. That gave the wild raspberries, which usually ripened in early August, an unexpected influx of the mysteriously delicate juice that make them so very different from the fragrant but bland garden raspberries. So the gals, without so much as a word to each other, started making forays into the closest of the raspberry patches that in the past couple of years had run rampant over the felled areas of the forest. After the nearest mile or two had been picked clean, they put their heads together and started going in threes, in fives, because the forest doesn’t care for any tomfoolery.

Only Granny Shura, a cantankerous old biddy with a sharp, spiky tongue that made her nobody’s favorite, still went out alone, for both the raspberries and the wild herbs that should only be gathered after the Feast of John the Baptist. With her old-school ways, she didn’t hold with frivolous attire. She also didn’t think much of mosquitoes, so she swaddled herself up, with a sweater jacket over a flannel shirt and on top of that, a canvas raincoat when it was threatening rain, all of which made her look like something between a mossy hillock and a fir tree withered from the roots up.

The young lasses, both married and single, roamed around the raspberry patches in a cheerful, garish flock, wearing light, gaudy sundresses and eye-popping headscarves that butterflies would settle on. But then there were the rubber boots, always the rubber boots, and that was nothing to laugh at, what with the marshy soil over here and the slithery snakes over there. They scattered across the cleared spots like a merry flight of birds, roaring with laughter and yelling to each other, or they’d suddenly strike up a song – all at once, without a word spoken – and it was always about love gone dismally wrong.

The raspberry baskets were willow or bast, with an open weave so the berries wouldn’t get squashed. The girls
 would brace the canes against their fronts and with quick fingers would strip the berries, trying to not to let any that were overripe, or crushed, or had a beetle along for the ride get into their baskets. The gorgeous Nyurka, the village’s number one cut-up, could pop a berry in her mouth and needle the girl next to her and sing along all at the same time.

And on they pressed, because the berries seemed bigger and juicier the deeper in they went, plus they could grab up a few of the cloudberries that trailed over the mossy mounds, and blackberries too, still unripe by July and puckery in the mouth. They gradually wandered farther away from each other, hallooing back and forth, quietly at first and then less often, and only when one of them was all alone by a raspberry patch that bordered on a dense thicket, when the wind was bending the pine branches overhead, did the desperate wailing begin: “N-i-i-i-nka? Mashka! Mashka! Nyurka! Have you seen Valentina? No? Stay still, Mash, I’m coming your way. Stay still, I can’t see a blessed thing!”

The raspberry patches were interspersed with small marshes, deceptively green, as if someone had spread a plush rug underfoot. But if you step on it, there’s a squelching sound and a second later, that sucking feeling, and you’ll be lucky if you just lose a boot, because there have been times when a gal went into the forest and never came back. But this time everything went off just fine, and they sat down in a glade, under a nut tree, and unfolded fresh-laundered kitchen towels and set out their simple fare of boiled eggs, rye bread, cheese home made from eggs stewed with milk curds, and young green onions too. And a rag-plugged bottle put in an appearance, as usual – a bottle of murky moonshine brewed from blackcurrant buds. They drank daintily, a sip at a time, nibbling on eggs and onions and washing it down with water drawn from a nearby brook as cheery as it was tiny.

“A pretty sight, girls,” said Mashka, lying back. “See how heavy this nut tree’s crop’ll be. Will we be here come fall?”

“That we will,” Ninka yawned. “Why wouldn’t we? The summer folk’ll shell out a tenner for a glassful of them nuts on the market.”

“And what about cranberry season?” Lolling back against a pine tree, Valentina, the oldest, ruffled a cowberry bush with her hand. “First there’s the cowberry, then there’s the bilberry, but you’d better not miss the cranberries, or else the bums from Kropilino and Lokhi will swoop in and leave the place bare.”

“Right you are,” the other girls chimed in. “Cranberries fetch a much better price.”

The sun had peeped out, making drowsy heads nod, and they fell asleep any old way, some seated and others on their sides. And that, wouldn’t you know it, was exactly when Granny Shura, bundled up like a haystack, came waddling out, ten yards or so away, into her favorite forest tract, griping under her breath about these floozies from who-knows-where who’d looted everything and couldn’t stay put at home while she, and at her age too, had to clamber through places like this where you could break every leg you’ve got.

But to any outside observer, the source of that muffled grumbling couldn’t possibly have been a person, because then you’d have been able to make out the words. But no, not this time. Some kind of animal was coming their way, trampling through the bushes, and the dry brush was crackling, and the creature was snorting.

Mashka was the first to wake. A summer snooze in the heat of the day, after a few slugs of moonshine – no telling what dreams that’ll bring.

“Oh, mother of mine!” Mashka wailed. “Oh, my dear, my darling girls! The horror!
Oh, drat and darn!”

Valentina unglued her swollen eyes. “Why’re you hollering like a stuck pig?” she asked. “Seen the devil, have you? Or just a tractor driver?”

And then…

“BAAAAAR!” – it was a blood-curdling roar – “Girls! Run for your lives! Frickety frack,
if that don’t beat all! I’ve been hearing how a summer visitor, she got mauled this very year!”

That last part she had to yell at their backs, because they’d bolted in every direction, lumbering as they ran because our lasses are no lightweights. In fact, they’re chunky. Because what’s the good of being all skin and bones here in the village?

And so they ran – or, rather, galloped – jumping over wind-felled trees, the baskets tied to their belts scattering raspberries all the way.

Valentina got completely stuck between two pines and couldn’t so much as budge. She was roaring like a halfwit, she was crying. But all that Granny Shura could hear, being deaf to start off with and wearing a headscarf too, was “Bear, bear!” Scared to death, she took off after the lasses, to catch up with them and save herself. What they saw, though, was a hulking great animal, maybe gray, maybe brown, that seemed to be standing on its hind legs and roaring too, which meant it had to be a she-bear. And if, God forbid, there was a cub somewhere close? That was as bad as it gets.

On they flew, to the logging station, with the lasses in front and Granny Shura behind, until she got tangled up in some bushes and went to howling and moaning.

The loggers were sitting on a length of timber for an after-lunch smoke, and when they saw all this, they collapsed in helpless laughter. “On a cross-country sprint are you, lasses?” they wanted to know. “Then you should at least be wearing striped shorts and tank tops, ’cos that’s not a sporty look at all.”

The lasses pulled up short, their arms and legs scratched and stuck all over. This one had shed her boot, that one had torn her skirt.

“Bear!” they said when they’d caught their breath. “Yonder. It’s been charging at us all the way from Site Four! You’d best run and get a rifle.”

“And who’re we going to shoot?” the men guffawed. “Granny Shura? Nah, nothing short of an aspen spike through the heart’ll be the death of her.”

The lasses turned around, and there it was – a shapeless canvas sack lying in a bramble thicket and wheezing. They came down hard on Granny Shura for scaring them, and rightly so. But now they take her with them on their raspberry hunts, because she knows the secret places. Instead of a canvas coat, though, they make her wear an orange vest.
With reflectors.