At that my head was dealt a blow and I lost my voice. It would have been easy to think the sky had struck me—my once powerful, now shabby Gök-Deeri—but I knew it was Father who had whacked me. Barely conscious, I sensed myself falling to the ground and tumbling down the stony slope. Then I felt hands on my neck and my face, and I noticed a face above me. It was blurry, but I recognized Mother by her calloused warm hands. She held my neck and stroked my cheeks. A little further up, outlined against the evening sky, I noticed another tall, blurry figure. I instantly picked up the fight again which, at that moment, seemed to me a fight I was neither allowed to quit nor to put off. I roughly pushed away Mother’s hands, got up, staggered toward the figure, and roared with all my strength: “I-ih-iiij, now that you have poisoned my dog, why don’t you kill me, too! Go right ahead and kill me, I am ready! Why should I continue to struggle on this earth, far from Brother and Sister, without Grandma, without my flock and without Arsylang, beneath a sky that is blind and deaf?!”

Suddenly all the troubles and sacrifi es I had endured during the endlessly long spring came back to me, and words poured out of me like water gushing from a turned-over basin: “Beat me to death or finish me off some other way. If you think I am afraid of dying, you are wrong. If you don’t kill me, I’ll do it myself. I’ll jump off a cliff or do myself in some other way. I want to die, and I want to be eaten by black worms. I am not your child anyway, I am your slave. Have you ever let me sleep in? Do you even know how cold I am, how hungry, and how tired? All you ever think of are your animals. Fodder for the wolves! You never think of your children! You have already given away two of them. And as for me, you make me slave away like a Kazakh herdboy!”

I hurled these words the way people hurl rocks. I wanted them to hit my parents, to hurt and kill them.