The Boy who Became a Hornbill | A Folk Tale from Nagaland

Long, long ago, an orphan boy lived with some of his relatives. The couple who looked after him always ill-treated him. Whenever he went to work in the fields, the woman gave him rice mixed with rat droppings. She also gave him a porcupine’s quill to pick out rice from the messed-up food.

Every day, when all the other boys and girls sat together to eat, he would sit alone and eat his food.

One day, when he went to wash his hands after having his meal, two of the girls decided to see what he had eaten. After opening his lunchbox, they were shocked to find the filthy rice mixed with rat droppings.

From that day onward, the two girls would throw his food away and put their own food into his lunchbox. They threw away the water in his zu-gourd and filled it with zao kasang (rice beer) from theirs. Every day, the boy would come back and find good food in box. He checked with everyone else to see if it belonged to them. Even when everyone said the food wasn’t theirs, he refused to eat it.

Yet, the two girls continued to replace the food in his lunchbox when he went to wash his hands. However, the boy left the food untouched every day.

One day, he asked one of the girls what was dearer to them – he or their clothes. The girl replied that she loved him more. The boy asked her to give him her skirt and the black cloth she wore on her chest. Putting those clothes on, he asked her to break the neck of the gourd and give it to him.

The boy wore the skirt and the black cloth. He placed the neck of the gourd over his mouth like a beak. He then climbed onto the roof and asked her how he looked. Before she could reply, he climbed up a tree. He sat on a branch of the tree and turned into a hornbill bird. He then began shrieking, just like a hornbill would. The girl started to cry and pleaded with him to come down so they could go back to the village.

‘It’ll be a while before I come back. When you hear a hornbill flapping its wings, you must come out of your house and sit outside,’ saying so, the hornbill flew away.

He was the last bird in the flight, dropping one of his prettiest tail feathers on her. Weeping, the girl went back to her village.

Several months later, she heard hornbills flapping their wings. She came running out of her house and looked above. When she spotted the last hornbill in the flock, the bird dropped another one of its tail feathers. The feather came floating down, landing on the girl’s chest.

The woman who had adopted the boy also saw this. She also asked the hornbill to give her something. However, all she got was the hornbill’s droppings into her eyes, leaving her blind.

The girl treasured the feather and kept it safely. A few years later, she got married. The couple led a prosperous and healthy life together for several years.