Another source of concern was wild animals, especially wild pigs. Pigs were most destroyers of wheat fields; they were as big as a cow. They plough the fields at night with their long sharp tusks and in the morning, the angry and poor farmers took their revenge on them. There was no mercy for wild boars, as pork is not allowed in Islam so people have more than one excuse to be violent against pigs. There were many legends about pigs as they said that mouse, their next enemy at home, was dirty and ugly because it was created from a pigs sneeze! Everybody regarded a pig as a dirty and dangerous animal and believed that God will reward those who kill the biggest number of them. Other animals of concern were wolves, as they ate their sheep, foxes as they ate their chicken and bears which they were scared of them.They normally hunted wild goats, wild sheep, deer, rabbit and fox for their meat. Foxes are hunted only in winter, as they are too thin and smelly at summer in hot countries.

This struggle between men and animals lasted until Man controlled all the other animals, as many of the most dangerous ones wiped out.  After that struggle was settled with Man’s victory, Man did not see peace as he was expecting it; the struggle was replaced by a bloody struggle between Man and Man, which has no any signs of settlement until now.  People kill each other mercilessly, there are colleges and universities who teach people how to kill. There are job vacancies for human killers and there are ministries and big institutions to organize human killing. Humans kill humans systemically, they do not feel they do anything wrong. They are proud of it. Thousands of factories manufacture thousand kinds of weapons, rifles, tanks, bullets, shells and tons of chemicals and nuclear bombs without the slightest guilt of doing wrong.  When two ordinary men or women argue in a street people look at them as stupid and low, however when a country invades another country or war declared between two countries or two groups within one country people look at them as those who carry out official military roles and missions.

Uncle Arif had no internet to surf, no satellite dish to look at, no television to watch and no radio to listen to. He was not even bothered about bills, as he had not electricity, no gas and the water was coming from a free endless fountain. He used wood for heating, cooking and even illumination. At that time at nights, when everybody was coming back from work they needed some kind of amusement.  That amusement was telling sagas. Sagas were endless, or looked like to be. They came down from generation to generation and learned by heart. At the end of any chapter or night session, they asked a boy or a girl to tie a knot on her/his finger in order to make it a clue to remind the saga teller about the place they have stopped at. My grandfather was the most popular saga teller of that time. The proof for that comes from the reality that people from surrounding villages came to listen to his sagas. There were no greed, no money involved, he told sagas just for the sake of friendship, to entertain others and to show them that you care about others. This was a tradition came down from generation to generation.

By the time I was a small boy the time of the long sagas was over. Most of the famous saga tellers were dead; many of them had forgotten many chapters and young people were not eager to learn them by heart any more. My great aunt was always saying, ‘now life is very complicated, people run after money and listen to radio! At the time of uncle Arif, life was very simple’. The last stories were not so long, not so interesting and had little adventures, as the elderly said. However, for me and children of my age they were perfect; we did not see anything better before. They talked about the man who left his village, travelled tens of miles to a very far country. On his journey, he faced many difficulties, he saw strange people and struggled with furious animals and overtook harsh weather. Now that man can travel the same distance in one hour without any difficulty. Another story which I can remember now was about the little boy who his mother died and his father married again, the stepmother refused to feed him. That boy prayed and God accepted his prayer to become a crow. Every day that crow was flying and landing by the Ahmed’s farm and talked to the farmer who worked for Ahmed as a normal human being. Asking him questions about what was going on at home and what they are doing now.  When children asked how a crow could talk, they said, ‘that was God’s will, Solomon could talk to all animals same as humans’.  They always said that nowadays people are bad, that is why we cannot talk to an animal or bird! In a Russian novel of 17th Century, I read one character saying: people nowadays are not like in the past, they are very nasty! I noticed Shakespeare complaining about juvenile nuisance of his day and I can see the same attitude nowadays as people continuously complain about the youth and children of today and always refer to the good behaviour of the Victorian era!  

Another story was the story of the man who travelled with the giants by riding a cloud. On the way the giant was very hungry and told him to give him a little bit of his flesh to put it on his tooth, when the giant tasted the flesh he said: ‘it is good that I did not know before that human flesh was so sweet, otherwise I ate all of you!’ The man and the giant reached a place where the giant took a nap beside a river; he advised the man when he had to awake him. ‘A white water will come’ the giant said ‘you do not have to awake me, a yellow water will come you have not to awake me, a blue water will come... when a red water comes awake me straight away’.  The giant slept and the man was watching the river. The river changed colour many times, and the man was watching it without even a blink of eye. When the red water arrived, he awoke the giant and both continued their journey. That journey was endless. At that time, it was very important to hear anything about far away countries. Your information whether it was right or wrong still was important for those people who believed that some miles away from their village there might be a giant’s village, there could be people who had two heads and snakes who were as big as a cow. That fear from travel and leaving home was in action until the end of the twentieth century. People believed that leaving home meant betraying your homeland. If you leave your country, they argued, you become like the rock on the high mountain that left its place; it lost its balance and went slippery slope to the bottom of the hill where it was covered with mud and disappeared.

Most of the stories were about evil women such as the evil old woman who told a lie to the poor lover that his beloved was dead and the lover killed himself. In return for that the king, who was in love with the girl, told the old woman that she could get as much as her weight gold as a reward, the stupid woman said, ‘ no sir, give me as much as my weight wool’! That story was very interesting for children and adults, it made everybody laugh at that stupidity. The story of the woman who betrayed her husband and took all the nice and white bread to her secret lover and served her hardworking husband with black and sour bread. When the husband asked her about the reason she simply said: Oh man, do you know why the bread turns to become sour? It is because your sister in Khorasan (the most supposed faraway place at that time, now a place in Iran!) is farting. As much as she farts, our wheat flour becomes black and sour! The man rode his horse, galloped nonstop to Khorasan, and killed his sister. When I studied English literature years later, I found a lot of similar insults towards women such as the women witches who tricked Macbeth by telling him his fate. The role of Lady Macbeth was also not less in cruelty than the witches. It looks like that all these aggressions against women for demoralizing and disrupting them were globally netted as a gender war of male against female. Another name, or the most common and general name for women was Za’ifa (Weaker), which meant that women were weaker than men physically and mentally. The most tragic thing was that when they retold these stories, I heard many women saying, ‘it is true, definitely true: all women are evil’. It is a pity that women were so brain washed at that time by superstition, legends and religion that they believed the insults against themselves. However, as an English writer also observed, the position of women in the Kurdish society was much better than their neighbours!

Nowadays I see many sagas transferred to cartoon films, computer games and movies. I wonder if I could claim some money from those companies for the copyright of the works of my grandfather and other saga tellers of my village.