The Iroquois lad would be quite satisfied with this account of the matter; but a boy on the opposite side of the continent would get a very different explanation. He would be told that Raven did it. Raven—or the raven—was the mythical ancestor or culture hero, as ethnologists would say, of the foremost clan of the Tlingit tribe, whose territory was in southern Alaska. He was present at the making of the world and its people, and did many marvellous things. While he was at Sitka arranging affairs in the new world he assigned to all the birds, one by one, the place of their resort and their habits, and his good nature is shown by the fact that to the robin and the hummingbird he assigned the duty of giving pleasure to men, the former by its song and the latter by its beauty. By and by the birds dressed one another in different ways, so that they might easily be recognized apart. They tied the hair of the bluejay up high with a string, put a striped coat on the little woodpecker, and so on. The Kwakiutl coastal Indians of British Columbia deny this, however. They say the birds did not select their own costumes, but that one of their ancestors painted all the birds he found at a certain place. When he reached the cormorant his colors were exhausted and he had only charcoal left, hence the cormorant is wholly black.
George Keith,[[99]] who in 1807 was a fur-trader on the Mackenzie River, gathered and recorded much valuable material as to the customs and ideas of the Beaver Indians of that region, who belonged to the Ojibway family. In one of his stories Keith gives the Indians’ explanation of how certain birds got their colors: it was during the time of a great flood. At that period all birds were white, but l’épervier (the sharp-shinned hawk), l’émerillon (the goshawk), and l’canard de France (mallard) agreed to change to a plumage in colors—how it was to be done the Indians were unable to say. The story proceeds:
Immediately after this event the corbeau [raven] made his appearance. “Come,” says l’épervier to the corbeau, “would you not wish to have a coat like mine?” “Hold your tongue!” rejoined the corbeau. “With your crooked bill is not white handsomer than any other color?” The others argued with the corbeau to consent, but he remained inflexible, which so exasperated l’épervier and the others that they determined to avenge this affront, and each taking a burnt coal in his bill they blacked him all over. The corbeau, enraged at this treatment, and determined not to be singular, espied a flock of étourneaux [blackbirds] and, without shaking off the black dust of his feathers, threw himself amongst them and bespattered them all over with black, which is the reason for their still retaining this color.
Further south, on Puget Sound, once lived the tribe of Twanas, who held that in former times men painted themselves in various hues, whereupon Dokblatt, their culture-hero, who notoriously was fond of changing things, turned these men into birds, which explains the present diversity in avian plumage.
The Arawaks of Venezuela, however, account for this matter by saying that the birds obtained their gay feathers by selecting parts of a huge, gaudily colored water-snake that the cormorant killed for them by diving into the water; yet the cormorant, with great modesty, kept for himself only the snake’s head, which was blackish.
Most explanatory stories concern single kinds of birds, and inform us how they got the peculiar features by which we identify them with their names; and here we get back to the nearctic raven. A history of the exploits of this personage—bird, bird-man or bird-god—who is the hero of more tales than any other of the giants that flourished in the formative period of the northern Indian’s world, would fill a big book. “The creator of all things and the benefactor of man was the great raven called by the Thlingit Yel, Yeshil or Yeatl, and by the Haida Ne-kilstlas. He was not exactly an ordinary bird but had ... many human attributes, and the power of transforming himself into anything in the world. His coat of feathers could be put on or taken off at will like a garment, and he could assume any character whatever. He existed before his birth, never grows old, and will never die.” So Mr. (now Admiral) Niblack, U. S. N., characterized this supreme magician;[[100]] and Dr. E. W. Nelson[[101]] adds that this creation-legend is believed by the Eskimos from the Kuskoquim River in southern Alaska northward to Bering Strait, and thence eastward all along the Arctic Coast. The purely mythological relation of this widely revered northwestern raven is thus summarized by Brinton[[27]]:
This father of the race is represented as a mighty bird, called Yel, or Yale, or Orelbale, from the root [Athabascan] ell, a term they apply to everything supernatural. He took to wife a daughter of the Sun (the Woman of Light), and by her begat the race of men. He formed the dry land for a place for them to live upon, and stocked the rivers with salmon that they might have food. When he enters his nest it is day, but when he leaves it it is night; or, according to another myth, he has two women for wives, the one of whom makes the day, the other the night. In the beginning Yel was white in plumage, but he had an enemy ... by whose machinations he was turned black. Yel is further represented as the god of the winds and storms, and of the thunder and lightning.
It is plain that in studying the deeds and accidents attributed to this American member of the sun-born “fabulous flock” described in another chapter, it is often difficult to separate Raven the demigod, from the sable, kawing, cunning bird so conspicuous all over northern Canada; and in this respect Yel differs from Rukh, Simurgh, and the other similar figments of Oriental fancies, in that he is modelled upon a real bird, rather than on something utterly unknown to earthly ornithology.
A favorite tale with many variants describes how the cormorant lost its voice. As the Haidas of Queen Charlotte Islands tell it, Raven once invited the cormorant to go a-fishing with him. The cormorant went, and naturally caught many fish, while the Raven took none. Then Raven, angry made the cormorant stick out its tongue. “There is something on it,” quoth Raven, and pulled the tongue out by the roots; and that is why cormorants have no voice.[[C]]
[C]. The cormorant was once a wool-merchant. He entered into a partnership with the bramble and the bat, and they freighted a large ship with wool. She was wrecked and the firm became bankrupt. Since that disaster the bat skulks about until midnight to avoid his creditors, the cormorant is forever diving into the deep to discover its foundered vessel, while the bramble seizes hold of every passing sheep to make up the firm’s loss by stealing the wool. This is an ancient European story quite as silly as the Haida one.