Chingiz Aytmatov. “Oq kema”

A seven-year-old boy lives with his grandfather Mo‘min and grandmother at a forest station by a river. He has no friends: he plays by naming rocks “camel”, “wolf”, “saddle”. His grandfather buys him a new school satchel from the travelling shop, and the boy, looking through binoculars at the white ship on Issiqko‘l, believes his father is a sailor on it and dreams of turning into a fish and swimming to the ship. The grandfather tells him the legend of the Horned Mother Deer: when the Kyrgyz by the Enasoy were slaughtered, the white Mother Deer saved two children and carried them to Issiqko‘l, and later the deer left because greedy descendants hunted them. In the last part of the excerpt Mo‘min, under O‘rozqul’s pressure and the pleading of his daughter, who suffers from being childless, is forced to kill the deer; after seeing O‘rozqul smash the deer’s head, the boy says he will turn into a fish and walks into the river, and the story ends in sorrow.