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In the SHOW ME STATE there is an agrarian hamlet whose founders were German. They had traveled down the Missouri River in search of a new settlement when they saw a particular patch whose hills and valleys reminded them of the hills of the Old Country. Because of its striking resemblance to their Teutonic homeland, they decided to set up roots in this new region. They called their new home, Hermann. Hermann's first residents included farmers and hunters.
There was one hunter who loved his wife so very much that he would always make sure she was well-fed. Naturally, that meant he would always be out hunting for game so as to bring his bounty home to her.
But one day he decided to return home earlier than usual because his hunting gear needed to be mended. Unfortunately, when he arrived at the log cabin that he shared with his wife, he discovered that she had with her a lover. And not just any lover---this lover was a farmer.
The hunter flew into a rage! He realized that rather than requiting the love and spousal devotion he had given his wife through his fidelity and through his daily sacrifices of providing her with food via the dangerous occupation of hunting, she was instead cheating on him.
The hunter therefore dispatched his rival despite the protests of his wife. Seeing her lover die before her likewise drove the hunter's wife to take her own life right before her husband's eyes, too.
The hunter had not anticipated his wife retaliating in that fashion, so he was not quick enough to stop her. As a result, the hunter was thrown into even deeper sorrow at the mortal loss of the wife he had for so long dedicated his life to.
And so the hunter went back into the woods, this time in search of a neighboring Native American tribe's shaman. The hunter told the shaman his story, and then asked the shaman to help bring his wife back from the dead. Because the hunter had been a good friend to the shaman's tribe, the shaman decided to do this favor for the hunter. The shaman therefore accompanied the hunter back to the hunter's log cabin.
At the hunter's log cabin, the shaman performed a ritual that brought the hunter's wife back to life. But when she opened her eyes and happened to gaze at her husband, her memory immediately recalled the brutality he had executed on her lover. Consequently, she grabbed the hunter's blade, and-as she bolted through the door and ran to the back of the log cabin-she kept stabbing herself, leaving a trail of blood behind her. Once she reached the lake behind their log cabin, she threw herself into it. Not knowing how to swim, she drowned.
The hunter howled in anguish at losing his wife yet again. The shaman, having witnessed the whole thing, took further pity on the hunter, so he performed a different ritual as the hunter recovered his wife's lifeless body from the lake.
When the shaman had completed the ritual he told the hunter that his wife can be restored to life on one condition-that the blood she had lost be restored back to her. Then, as the shaman chanted a medicine-man thaumaturgical incantation, the hunter's wife dissolved at the lake's edge into tiny, winged insects.
And that was how the Missouri mosquito came into being..... and that is also why during every Oktoberfest the SHOW ME STATE's agrarian hamlet of Hermann is deluged by visitors who want to see if the year's mosquitoes have gathered enough blood to bring the hunter's wife back to life.
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