“So what?” asked Mrs. Nettla. “Do you just stand there till they come up to you and say hello to them?”
Bambi’s mother answered softly, “Of course I don’t just stand there, I run away.”
And Faline burst out with, “You should always run away!” Everyone laughed. They continued talking about this third hand, and as they did so they became more serious and the sense of the horror of it came among them. Whatever it was, a third hand or something different, it was something terrible, something they could not understand. Most of them knew about it only from what they had been told by others, but some of them had seen it with their own eyes. He would stand there, a long way off, without moving, there was no way of explaining what He did or how it happened, but there would suddenly be a bang like thunder, fire sprayed out, and even at that distance from Him you would collapse with your breast torn open, and you would die. They all lowered their heads while she told them this as if they were pressed down by some dark force that had some inexplicable power over them. They listened eagerly to the many different accounts of seeing Him, and every story was full of horror, full of blood and suffering. They took all this in and still wanted to hear more of what was being said. Stories that must have been made up, all the fairy tales and legends they had heard from their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and as they listened they unconsciously learned, while still afraid, about how to make peace with this dark world or, at least, to run away from it.
“How does that happen, asked young Karus, quite dispirited, “that He can be so far away and still knock you down?”
“Didn’t your clever crow explain that to you?” sneered Mrs. Nettla.
“No,” said Karus with a smile, “she says she’s often seen it, but no-one knows how to explain it.”
“Well, He can even knock the crows down from the tree when He feels like it,” observed Ronno.
“And He knocks the pheasants down from the sky,” Auntie Ena added.
Bambi’s mother said, “He throws His hand out there. That’s what my grandmother told me.”
“Does He really?” Mrs. Nettla asked. “And what is it that makes that horrible thunderous noise then?”