Out of her four siblings Musti was always Höpö's favourite and the closest to her. She was very glad to find her still alive, when she finally came back home to Kaarnekorpi after all those years.
musti © robbin

Growing up Höpö had a lot of friends and more than a few more-than-friends, Marel one of them. When he then proposed, Höpö didn't think twice before saying yes. They didn't have the blessing of either their parents but it didn't matter. They were in love - or something close enough - and that was enough!
But when Marel started hinting that they should make their relationship public and actually get married, Höpö started to doubt herself. They were still young and although it had been fun, and despite all the words of eternal love, she wasn't sure if she wanted to spent the rest of her life with him. Or, well, she sure that she didn't want that.

Höpö wasn't sure how he would react to getting rejected, and wasn't too keen to find out. She couldn't even use the excuse that her parents didn't approve of the union, because they had both swore a million times that they wouldn't care about anything anyone else might say.

So instead of simply breaking up with him, she infromed everyone that she wanted to learn magic more deeply than she could as just a shaman surrounded by her pack. She wanted to become a tietäjä and simply had to leave, if she wanted to follow her dreams.

So, without ever telling anyone the real reason, she left her home to study - leaving behind the very disappointed and heartbroken Marel, her family and everything she'd known and loved.

Despite wanting to become a tietäjä was originally just an excuse, now that Höpö had left the pack, she might as well actually do it. And do she did. She studied under other shamans, then seeked out every tietäjä she could, and then even got some lessons from few noitas - tietäjäs who were using their powers for dark deeds.

It was very lonely living alone without a pack, so Höpö got very interested in any Words that had to do with connecting with other animals, and especially the boreal owl - which she was named after - became very familiar to her.
After birds she got very interested in other flying creatures, too, - mainly the bees. And then she became even more interested in the honey they produced.

Tasty even as is as it was, Höpö realized that if you mixed it with water and left it for a while, you got an intoxicating mead. Weighed down by loneliness, she considered this a real stroke of luck and it didn't take long for her to abandon all of her other studies while focusing on perfecting her honey drink recipe, and using all her time and efforts on finding the best spells for making the honey drink.

Soon she was more often drunk than she was sober. It's just research! she would've said if there would've been anyone around to ask. At this point months went by without her seeing anyone even from a distance.
Sometimes she played around with the idea of going back home to her pack, even if just to visit, but always ended up dismissing the idea with some pretext. Things were just fine here! No one in the pack would even remember her anymore! It would've felt like giving up!
So, Höpö continued living as a hermit, making and drinking her honey drink.

Once a travelling lone wolf happened to come by Höpö's lonely den. She offered him a place to rest for a while. The traveller ended up staying almost the whole autumn with her, drinking and having fun, but as the winter came creeping in, he left and was never seen again, leaving behind nothing but a litter of puppies growing in Höpö's belly.

The puppies were born in a winter when the dead were walking the earth and trying to lure the living with them to the underworld. Höpö was struggling hard, getting weaker and weaker trying to keep herself and the sizable litter alive, and the smallest of the pups were already dying. Not even knowing what was real and what was not, Höpö realized that she had to do something if she wanted even one of the puppies to survive.

So, she gathered the remaining puppies and set out on a journey to bring them to a pack's safety where they would be taken cared of. Supposedly she could've brought them back home to Kaarnekorpi to Kaarnekynnet and to her family, but she was too ashamed and scared to let them see how horribly her life seemed to be going. So instead she started leading the puppies to the home of Ryövärit.

Despite the fires she made to keep them warm and safe from the maahiset, more pups had to be left behind when they got too weak to walk anymore. But Höpö was determined that she could bring at least one child alive to safety, even if it killed her and all of the other pups.
In the end two of them were still alive when they reached the borders of the territory of Ryövärit. Höpö left them with the first ryöväri she came upon - a female who seemed friendly and helpful enough.

Then she crawled back to where she came from, and there she stayed the next few years drinking and indulging in mushrooms, until she realized she had gotten old and would like to see her lovely Kaarnekorpi one last time before her death.
›› link (technically this västi is from another universe where some details of both of their lives and stories are a bit different)

Musti's grandchild who Höpö met when she first returned to Kaarnekorpi.
uikku © karelyon

Musti's grandchild.
pulmu © robbin

Pulmu's children. Höpö probably never met them.
raakku © robbin
›› link