I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors
against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids. Then I lost my spirit.
Since the day I was taken from my mother I had suffered extreme indignities. People
had stared at me. I had been tossed about in the air like a wooden puppet. And now
my long hair was shingled like a coward’s! In my anguish I moaned for my mother, but
no one came to comfort me. Not a soul reasoned quietly with me, as my own mother
used to do; for now I was only one of many little animals driven by a herder.