“You found the soushkinboudera ,” she said softly.

She nodded. “The soushkinboudera will sleep now. For a while.”

“What happens if no one sits with it next time?”

In the mist-veiled valleys of the Ural Mountains, old Zoya was known for two things: her pickled cloudberries and her strange vocabulary. When the village children asked what lay beyond the Foggy Ridge, she would whisper, “The soushkinboudera.”