Knecht’s sacrifice is the climax of the Rainmaker’s story: as drought threatens the village with famine and the community turns against him, he offers his life and places his son Turu in his office. The ceremony completes a succession prepared through apprenticeship and shaped by a tradition in which the Rainmaker’s authority over weather and planting is paired with the possibility that the community may sacrifice him when every remedy fails. Knecht’s death ends his tenure; Turu’s first formal act begins the next one.

The Rainmaker and the custom of sacrifice

The sacrifice belongs to a village order in which knowledge of nature, communal planting, and ritual authority are distinct but connected. The Rainmaker studies the moon’s phases and effects, reading inherited rules alongside his own experience. In spring, he determines the appropriate sowing days for different plants. The opening act of the sowing season, however—the scattering of the first handful of grain and seeds on community land—belongs to the tribal mother or her oldest female relative, because that act is held to be too exalted for an ordinary man.

Knecht’s office also encompasses remedies for crisis. During prolonged drought or persistent cold and damp, he leads sacrifices, exorcisms, and processions intended to protect the fields and the community from famine. The tradition contains a final, terrible recourse: when persuasion, pleas, threats, and other methods cannot move the spirits, the community may sacrifice its Weathermaker. The tribal mother is said to have witnessed such a sacrifice in the days of the mothers and grandmothers. Knecht’s death therefore occurs within an established ritual expectation, but its immediacy comes from the particular disaster afflicting his village.

The succession has a personal history as well as a ritual one. Knecht became Turu’s apprentice, and the older Rainmaker trained his senses in a body of knowledge transmitted chiefly through experience and observation rather than formal concepts. Its heart was close attention to the moon and its relation to the dead and to new births. The apprenticeship made Knecht the publicly recognized successor: if he proved capable, he would become the next Rainmaker. The later sacrifice reverses the direction of that inheritance. Knecht, now the father and officeholder, prepares Turu to succeed him.

Drought and the decision to offer himself

The year’s promise collapses into disaster. After renewed winter frosts and a spring of erratic weather, summer brings the worst drought anyone can remember. The smaller streams dry up, the village pond shrinks to a muddy marsh, and the crops wither. Clouds gather but yield dry lightning; occasional showers are followed by parching winds. Against this worsening crisis, the villagers’ rituals fail to bring relief.

Knecht tells his son that the year will end badly and that the misfortune may cost him his life. He instructs Turu to take up the office immediately if he is sacrificed, to insist that his body be burned and his ashes scattered over the fields, and to prevent anyone from touching the community’s seed grain, under penalty of death. He predicts that the people will suffer hunger through the winter but that the evil spells will be broken and the following year will be better. His words make the sacrifice more than a forecast of his own death: they give his successor specific duties and establish the protection of seed grain as a condition of the community’s future.

The village’s despair turns against Knecht. Maro incites the people, threats and curses are directed at the Rainmaker, and Ada falls seriously ill. Knecht continues to lead the processions because that is his duty, yet after the villagers disperse he is left alone and shunned. He knows that Maro has already pressed the tribal mother to demand his sacrifice. Rather than wait for that demand to determine his son’s standing, Knecht takes the initiative for the sake of his own honor and Turu’s: he dresses Turu in the ceremonial robes, brings him before the tribal mother, proposes him as successor, and offers himself in sacrifice. She studies him and agrees.

The ceremony and its reversal

The sacrifice takes place the same day. Illness keeps many villagers away, including Ada, who is gravely sick. The tribal mother, two of her oldest sisters, the village leaders, Maro, and the villagers who can attend form a subdued procession. Turu walks in ceremonial dress, wearing a tall fox-fur headdress, and is nearly overcome by the heat. Knecht has chosen the large circular forest clearing where the ceremony is to occur; many of the men carry stone axes to cut wood for the funeral pyre.

At the clearing, Knecht is placed in the center. The village dignitaries make an inner ring and the rest of the crowd stands farther out. When the assembled people hesitate in embarrassed silence, Knecht speaks for himself: he has served as Rainmaker as well as he could for many years, his work no longer succeeds, and he has therefore offered himself in the belief that his death will placate the demons. He announces that his son will be the new Rainmaker, tells the villagers to obey Turu after his death, and proposes Maro as executioner.

Maro’s role turns the ceremony against its apparent purpose. He approaches with an axe and raises it, but Knecht keeps his eyes open and looks steadily at him. The expression on the Rainmaker’s face hovers between pity and scorn. Maro, who hates his former teacher, cannot strike: he throws the axe away, says he will not do it, and disappears into the crowd. Several villagers laugh softly. The tribal mother, pale with anger at Maro’s failure and at Knecht’s defiance, calls on an old man to take his place. That man, who has known Knecht since boyhood, steps forward and gives him a brief, friendly nod. Knecht then closes his eyes and bows his head, and the old man carries out the execution.

Turu’s succession and the meaning of the ending

After Knecht falls, Turu cannot speak. He issues the necessary instructions by gesture, and the villagers prepare the pyre and lay his father’s body upon it. The fire is made with two consecrated sticks; directing that rite is Turu’s first official act as Rainmaker. The ceremony thus has two linked outcomes: the community enacts its inherited means of answering an unrelieved crisis, and Knecht’s successor immediately assumes responsibility for what follows.

Knecht’s earlier instructions give that responsibility practical shape. Turu is to preserve the seed grain even through winter hunger, while the ashes are to be spread over the fields and the next year is expected to improve. These directions are not shown being fulfilled in the supplied scene; what it establishes is the transfer of the office and the duties attached to it. The end of Knecht’s service becomes the beginning of Turu’s, marked not by an announcement alone but by the new Rainmaker’s first ritual action.

The story places Knecht’s deliberate offer beside the community’s demand for a sacrifice, without making the two identical. The village’s fear and Maro’s agitation make the custom a source of pressure; Knecht’s decision to present Turu as successor and offer himself gives the rite a shape he can still direct. His final address insists on continuity of service even as he recognizes that his methods have failed. Maro’s refusal briefly disrupts the prescribed ceremony, while the old villager’s intervention completes it. The ending is therefore both a death and a handover: the village loses its Rainmaker, and Turu receives an office whose authority, knowledge, and danger have now been made unmistakable.