he next day, when the lad was herding the cows on the mountain, the bracket bull came and said to him, “Take the horn off me and eat your enough now. That’s the last time for you. They are waiting to kill me to-night, but don’t you be afraid. It is not they who shall kill me, but another bull shall kill me. Get up on my back now.”
The lad got up on his back then and they went home. The two butchers were on each side of the gate waiting for him. The bracket bull struck a horn on each side of him, and he killed the two butchers. Out with him then, and the lad on his back.
He went into a wild wood, and he himself and the lad spent the night in that wood. He was to fight with the other bull on the next day.
When the day came, the bracket bull said, “Take the horn off me and eat your enough—that’s the last luck you have. I am to fight with the other bull immediately, and I shall escape from him to-day, but he will have me dead to-morrow by twelve o’clock.”
Himself and the other bull fought that day, and the bracket bull came back in the evening, and he himself and the lad passed that night in the wood.
When the next day came, the bracket bull said to him, “Twist the horn off me and eat your enough—that’s the last luck you’ll have. Listen now to the thing that I’m telling you. When you’ll see me dead, go and cut a strip of skin of the back and a strip of the stomach off me, and make a belt of it, and at any time at all there will be any hard pinch on you, you shall have my power.”
he bracket bull went then to fight with the other bull, and the other bull killed him. The other bull went away then. The lad came to the bracket bull where he was lying on the ground, and he was not dead, out-and-out. When he saw the boy coming he said, “Oh,” said he, “make haste as well as you can in the world, and take out your knife and cut that strip off me, or you will be killed as well as myself.”
There was a trembling in the poor creature’s hand, and he was not able to cut a piece at all off the bull, after his feeding him for so long, and after the kindness he had got from him.
The bracket bull spoke again, and told him to cut the strip off him on the instant, and that it would assist him as long as he would be alive. He cut a strip off the back then, and another strip off the belly, and he went away.