Each body of water - river, lake, pond has its own owner, who is usually called: water. Beliefs about the aquatic are widespread in the rich and swampy waters of Belarus and the northwestern regions of Russia.
A waterman, a waterman or a crowberry, a water grandfather, a water devil, lives on large rivers and lakes, swamps, in reeds and sedges, sometimes swims on a block of wood or on a korchaga; found in pools and especially near mills.
This is a naked old man, covered in mud, similar in his customs to a goblin, but he has not overgrown with wool, is not so annoying and often even scolds him. He dives and can live in the water for whole days, and comes ashore only at night. However, water is also not known everywhere in our country.
He lives with mermaids, he is even revered by their highways, while the goblin always lives alone and, apart from some werewolf, does not tolerate any of his fellows around him. It is difficult to collect detailed information about the water one; only one peasant told me about him as an eyewitness - for the most part others only knew that there were watery ones somewhere, but God knows where. A watery rather timid old man who was brave only in his kingdom, in a whirlpool, and there, if angry, grabs bathers by the legs and drowns them, especially those who go swimming without a cross or not at the specified time, in late autumn.
He loves catfish and almost rides it; he sometimes weaves a boyar hat out of a green kuga, he also wraps kuga and mud around his belt and frightens the cattle at the watering hole. If he decides to saddle a bull or a cow in the water, then it breaks under him and, getting stuck, dies.
On a quiet, moonlit night, he sometimes, amused, slaps his palm resoundingly on the water and the rumble is heard on the stretch from afar. There is a belief that if you sit down at an ice-hole on cowhide and outline around a stub, then the water ones, jumping out of the hole at midnight, pick up the skin and carry the one sitting on it wherever he wishes. When you return to the place, you need to have time to screw up: mind me!
Once the children were swimming under the mill; when they already began to dress, someone emerged from under the water, shouted: tell at home that Kuzka died - and dived, the children came home and repeated these words to their father in the hut: then suddenly someone with a noise and shout: ay, ah, ah, jumped off the stove and ran out: it was a brownie, and the news came to him about someone from a waterman. There are also many stories that the watermaker spoils the mills and breaks the dams, and the healers survive it, pouring it into the water on morning and evening dawns on a bag of ash.
