With the serpent king gone from the Yamuna and the river running clean again, the two brothers pushed their grazing farther out. Their cattle carried them toward Mount Govardhana, into wide green country thick with good grass. Not every wood along the way was safe. Kansa had loosed his creatures across the land with a single command, to seek out and destroy anyone who stood with the gods against him, and some of those creatures had taken forests for their own and squatted in them, waiting for these two boys.

One such wood stood on the northern bank of the Yamuna, a grove of palms so tall and dark that their fruited, drooping crowns looked from a distance like a line of elephant trunks. The ground beneath them was cool and level and thick with grass, and the ripe fruit hung heavy and sweet. No one went in. The grove belonged to a demon named Dhenuka, who lived there in the shape of a donkey at the center of a whole herd of his own kind, and anyone who came near the fruit, man or beast or bird, he kicked to death. The cowherds could only look at that fruit from the edge of the trees and swallow their longing.

In the palmyra grove

One day the smell of the ripe fruit carried across to the brothers on the wind, and it was Krishna who spoke first. That fragrance was too sweet to belong to anything but nectar, he told Balarama, so they should go in and take the fruit, and take it now. Balarama laughed, walked into the grove, set his hands to the palm trunks, and shook them until the ripe fruit came down in a heavy rain.

The sound reached Dhenuka and lit his fury. He shook out his mane, threw up his tail, tore at the ground with a hoof, and came on with his eyes fixed and his lips drawn back, tracking the noise of the falling fruit until he found Balarama under a palm. He bit him first, a sudden slash of teeth, then spun on his forelegs and drove both hind hooves into Balarama’s chest. Balarama did not stagger. He caught the hind legs in his two hands, swung the whole braying weight of the demon in a circle above his head, and hurled him straight up into the crown of the tallest palm. Dhenuka came down through his own tree with his thighs and neck and spine broken, and lay dead among the fallen fruit.

The rest of the herd charged, and Balarama took them the same way, one after another, catching each and flinging it up into the treetops until the whole herd rained back down around him. When it was over, the floor of the grove lay covered with palm fruit and the bodies of the beasts, and it looked like an autumn sky packed with cloud. The grove stood open and clean again. The cattle wandered in and grazed without fear, the herdsmen followed them in with the dread gone out of them, and the two brothers, broad and easy as young bull elephants, spread out seats of grass and sat down in the shade they had cleared. That day, for the first time, the cowherds ate the sweet fruit of that grove with nothing left to fear.

A rakshasa hidden in a game

When the grove was quiet the brothers moved on and came to the great Bhandira tree, a fig whose branches spread wider than any other in that country, and they made it the center of their play. They ran the forest paths with the other cowherd boys, ropes over their shoulders and wild flowers across their chests, the fair Balarama and the dark Krishna moving among the trees like a white cloud and a black cloud under a single rainbow. At the Bhandira tree they wrestled, threw stones, and matched themselves at every contest boys can invent.

Into that company came Pralamba, a demon of the first rank, and he had come to kill. He put on the body of a cowherd boy, hung himself with wild flowers, and joined the games with an easy smile until the others took him for one more friend. All the while he was measuring them. He judged Krishna too strong to be taken, gave up on him, and settled on Balarama.

Krishna called a new game that day, a leaping contest, the boys paired off two by two, and the rule was simple: whoever lost would carry the winner on his shoulders back to the foot of the Bhandira tree. Krishna drew a boy named Sridama. Balarama drew Pralamba. When the leaping was done, Krishna’s side had won every pairing; Krishna had beaten Sridama, and Balarama had beaten Pralamba. So the losers bent to carry the winners, and it fell to Pralamba to lift Balarama onto his shoulders, which was the one thing he had wanted all along.

He took Balarama up and set off, but not toward the tree. He turned the other way and walked fast, and as he walked he let his true size come. He grew. He rose. He began to climb toward the sky, meaning to carry his rider far past the reach of any help and finish him there.

One blow

For a few steps Balarama let it pass as part of the game. Then the boy under him kept climbing, and the shape stopped being a boy at all. Pralamba swelled to the height of the Bhandira tree and past it, a dark mountain of a body with a black shine to it, his face and neck monstrous, his eyes as wide as chariot wheels, a five-tiered crown blazing on his head like a second sun. The ground sank under his feet as he walked. He looked like Death itself, risen up and given a body. Riding those vast shoulders, Balarama understood at last what was carrying him.

He called down to his brother. Krishna, he said, this thing bearing me off is huge as a mountain and cased in armor; it has thrown up some great illusion and worn a boy’s shape to do it, and now its pride and its power have both doubled under me. Tell me how I bring it down.

Krishna knew exactly who his brother was, and he answered lightly, almost amused, because there was nothing here to fear. You are only playing at being a man, he said. Remember what you are. When the worlds dissolve, they rest on your coils; the gods have never found your end, and that is why they call you Ananta, the one without end. You are Sesha, the ancient one who carries the earth. You and I are one strength wearing two bodies, and between us we hold up the whole of creation. Stop waiting like a man who has forgotten himself. Make a fist and bring it down on this demon’s head like a thunderbolt.

Balarama heard him, and the memory of what he was came back to him all at once. His strength rose until it filled the three worlds. He closed his hand into a fist hard as a thunderbolt and drove it down onto Pralamba’s head. The blow crushed the skull and forced it down into the body. The life went out of the demon; he dropped to his knees, then toppled full length and lay stretched across the ground like a cloud torn loose and flung across the sky. From the ruin of his head the blood ran off in streams, the way water threaded with bright minerals runs down from the summit of a mountain.

Balarama let the great strength sink back out of sight, came down, and took Krishna in his arms. Overhead the gods had gathered in the sky, and along with the herdsmen they sang his victory. An unseen voice spoke out of the air: this demon, it said, whom the gods themselves could not master, has been brought down by force by a boy who never tires. For that deed the gods gave him a new name. They called him Baladeva, the god of strength, and the worlds have called him Baladeva ever since.

So the brothers ranged and played through the two months of the rains, and when the season turned they came back to Vraja and found the whole settlement busy and glad, making ready for a great offering. It was a festival for Indra, king of the gods and lord of the clouds, and Krishna, watching the preparations, began to ask what it was for. A new trial was already gathering over the cowherds, greater than any demon Kansa had ever sent, and this time it would come down out of the open sky, from Indra himself.

Source: Harivamsha (the khila-parva of the Mahabharata), Vishnu Parva, chapters 57 to 59; critical edition (P. L. Vaidya, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune). Told as story, following the original sequence of events.