The dwarf spruce trees and their drooping branches silhouetted against the morning sky appeared as tired soldiers who had given up their guard. Wisps of smoke greasy and sizzling with evil curled above the treetops and then, settling down, fit the tops of the trees like black helmets. Oily soot stretched across the sky, dimming the sun’s rays. Something was terribly wrong in Manti’s mystical bog.
Warned by the distant sight and smell of the black smoke, Odin looked for a tall tree to climb to see what was ahead. But the witch’s first thought was for her pet fisher. She led them to a regal white spruce, her fisher’s favorite hiding place. Manti stood at the base of the tree and called to her friend. When he heard her voice, the happy fisher scurried down the rough tree trunk to receive warm, loving strokes from Manti. With the fisher safe and Manti greatly relieved, the group’s attention turned to finding out what had happened to Manti’s home.
Trolls do not like to climb trees, as most are afraid of heights. However, Odin was not an ordinary troll. As a youngster, he had often climbed the trees of Mt. Grieg. With calloused feet, nimble toes and powerful hands, he pulled his body up and into the strong branches of the white spruce. When Odin reached the tree’s great height, he could clearly see Manti’s massive yew tree. The stone chimney belched choking fumes. Outside, fires blazed under oil-smudged cauldrons spewing smoke; the air reeked of skunk-scented crude oil.
A gang of oil trolls scattered around her yew tree were busy boiling a concoction in a large pot. Some, sitting on carpets of feathered mosses that grew under the yew’s spreading limbs, shielded their knobby heads from the falling oily soot. The trolls were squabbling and bragging over how much of this coveted brew some of the most gluttonous were consuming. In time, the squabbling escalated into angry, slurred shouts. Odin, ignoring the bickering, was disturbed to see the oil trolls had chopped down the witch’s barrier of herbs. The herbs’ ability to befuddle oil trolls who brushed against their foliage was now gone. He had to smile when he saw the smoke curling up from the black pots. Burning green wood soaked in crude oil had warned Manti and Odin of their presence.
Satisfied that he had seen enough, Odin returned to where his friends anxiously waited. When he explained the strange behavior of the oil trolls, Manti understood. Most likely they had placed cauldrons over the fires to boil spruce needles. The trolls were making their crude spruce-needle beer. With loud slurping and smacking of lips, they would drink their brew until dazed dopiness took control. When drunk, the trolls were more vicious than usual.
Anger welled up in Manti’s old body. How dare these simple-minded oil trolls invade her home and damage her bog! However, Manti was a clever and courageous witch. She kept her temper in check and immediately set out to outsmart the oil trolls. She picked up her pet fisher and quietly whispered something into his ear. When she set him down, he scampered back up the lofty spruce in which he had been hiding.
Weathered into the spruce’s wrinkled trunk was a deep burrow the fisher often used as his nest. In this crevice, Manti kept her treasured troll finger mushrooms. When properly used, these had healing powers; but if not prepared with healing in mind, the mushrooms could be dangerous. When he returned with the mushrooms, she hid them in her many pockets and went about selecting bog bugs with green blood.
Next, Manti sent her fisher off to kill and bring back two porcupines. Aside from snake meat, the porcupine was a much sought after delicacy among the oil trolls, simply because they did not know how to overcome and kill this rodent armed with painful quills.
With the mushrooms in her pockets and her fisher out hunting porcupines, they all sat down hidden under the sheltered branches of the spruce. Manti explained to her friends that she must wait for nightfall when her trustworthy friend, the moon, would throw her light across the darkened woods. The ancient witch was certain that on this particular night the moon would take charge of the blackness and give Manti the splendor of moonlight for mixing her potion.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Much of Manti’s sorcery came from the benevolent moon’s energy. The moon’s personality, powered by gravity, was strong enough to move great oceans and yet gentle as soft light. Like the moon, Manti’s gentleness was her strength. A spirited intuition floated between these two females.
For the rest of the day all except Manti slept. She spent some time searching the bog and selecting a black stone in the shape of a basin. Filling it with bog water, she let it sit while the water absorbed the sun’s energy. Carefully, she ground troll-finger mushrooms into powder.
When night embraced the woods and all was dark, the moon made her entrance and Manti woke her friends. As the faithful moon slowly rose higher in the sky, Manti faced its brilliance. She held the black basin filled with bog water as high as her crooked arms would allow. They watched in awe as Manti captured the full moon’s reflection in the basin of bog water in order to harness its energy. The moon’s luminescence glimmered and bounced off Manti’s white hair and, like liquid silver, poured into the basin; its spell mingled with the bog’s black water.
After adding her mushrooms to the energized water, she stirred the mixture with her gnarled fingers. The stones set in the rings on each of her fingers held their own individual power—the apple green stone gave protection from the evil eye, the ruby red bloodstone thickened the brew, and the black tourmaline added hypnotic powers. As the brew flowed over each stone, magical spasms rippled through the black water. Finally, she told her friends her weaponry against the evil trolls was complete.
By this time, the fisher returned with two dead porcupines. Manti instructed Odin on how to avoid the quills while skinning the prickly rodents. Gluttonous oil trolls would find the red meat of the porcupine irresistible. Voracious appetites dominated their nature; they never took the time to savor their food. The bitterness of troll finger mushrooms simmered with moon-power would go unnoticed. Manti knew they would gobble it down like hungry dogs.
Manti sprinkled her conglomeration over the porcupine meat Odin had prepared. The friends then settled back and waited until the full moon slowly disappeared below the horizon. By this time, the oil trolls had passed out due to the consumption of too much spruce-needle beer. Hidden by massive tree trunks, Odin quietly spread the porcupine meat among the drunken and sleeping oil trolls. With the meat distributed, the small party reunited in the midst of the woods and huddled together to fight off the wet chill of the night.
As dawn approached, Punga woke Odin who silently crept to the edge of the clearing near Manti’s tree home. They watched as the sleeping oil trolls awakened to the sun’s bright intrusion. Hungry and hung-over, they squirmed and yawned, exposing their dirty broken teeth, holding their heads and whining in pain.
The yelps of the first troll to discover the treat alerted the rest of the oil trolls to the morning feast. Odin could see their enormous nostrils twitch as the raw meat’s pungent aroma captured the attention of their piggish nature. Smacking and licking their swollen lips while tearing the meat into shreds, the trolls squealed with delight as they gobbled down the succulent delicacy.
Within moments, the senseless oil trolls began to hallucinate and see snow. The wrath of a winter storm circled in front of their eyes. The hallucinating trolls really believed they were seeing the snow and feeling the painful effects of severe cold. Oil trolls hate snow, which makes their noses, hands and the tips of their gnarled ears painfully cold. Worst of all, it makes their long scrubby tails freeze and they fear frostbite will cause their tails to drop off.
Panicked, they staggered out of Manti’s mystical bog and into the deep forest as fast as their short hairy legs would take them. Screaming in terror, they eventually came to the river’s edge. As was their habit, they sought shelter by curling their scabby-skinned bodies into gnarled lumps, thus disguising themselves as distorted roots. Their minds, still hallucinating from the recent meal of mushroom-laced porcupine meat, believed the snowmelt caused the river to flood. Their crazed attempts to escape the imagined flood caused many of the evil gang to drown in the flowing river. Years later, bodies of oil trolls soaked in tannic acid remained preserved in the peat bogs.
Manti, the troll finger mushrooms, and the moon’s force were too strong for the weak-minded oil trolls. The old albino witch had outsmarted them. The few oil troll survivors spread the story of the horrible snowstorm and sudden flood in the bottomlands and for many generations oil trolls were too afraid to return.