Then he put down a plank on the ground and took a piece of meat from under his blanket, and said to them, “All your husbands eat a great deal of this meat every day.” He put two pieces of the meat side by side on the plank. [[13]]Then he cut off a piece of the meat and greased the heads of all the women and the children. Then he pulled out of the ground the wall planks of the houses and sharpened them. If a wall plank was wide, he split it. He sharpened all of them. The Raven’s house was the last house in the village. He did not pull down its planks. He fastened the planks on the backs of the women, and said to the women, “Now go to the beach and swim towards the sea, and as you go, swim five times around that rock and then go out to sea. After this you shall be killer whales. When you find sea-lions you shall always kill them, but do not give any of them to stingy people. When you kill a good whale you shall eat it, but do not give any of it to stingy people. I shall take these children with me. They shall live on the sea and be my relations.” Then he began to split sinews; he split a great many of them. He threw down the sinews that he had split on the stones where the people used to gather their mussels, and said to the mussels, “After this when Bluejay and these others go to take up you mussels, you shall always be tied fast to the rocks.” [[14]]

Now the women went down to the water’s edge and swam about, and began slowly to jump out of the water. Five times they swam backward and forward before the village; then they went seaward, swimming very fast. They kept on to the island where Bluejay and his fellows were cooking their food. Bluejay said to the men, “What is this that is coming?” The men looked at the things that were coming, and saw the women often jumping out of the water. Five times they swam around that rock, then they went out to sea. After a while birds came flying after them towards the sea—birds with red bills, just as if blood were on their beaks. They kept following one another, many of them. Bluejay said: “Do you see these birds, how they keep coming? Where do they come from?” Then the Raven said, “How is it that you do not recognize these as your children?” Five times the birds flew around the rock, just as the women had gone around it, and then they flew away out to sea.

When Bluejay and his people were eating the meat that they had killed, that hunter said: “Quick, let us go home. I am afraid that we have seen bad spirits. We never before saw [[15]]anything like this at this rock.” Then they gathered some mussels, and put in the canoes the meat that was left and carried it with them. Just at evening they came to the village, and Bluejay called out, “Ah, Stikuá, come and get your mussels.” There was no noise of people running. Five times he called to her, but no one came. It was all still. They went up on the beach, and then they saw that no one was there, and that the walls of the houses had disappeared. Then they began to cry, and Bluejay cried too. Some one said to him, “Be quiet, Bluejay; if you had not been bad, our Chief would not have done this to us.”

Now they made only one house for all; all lived together. Only the Raven, who had been kind-hearted, had a house to himself. He often went along the beach looking for food, and was lucky, for sometimes he found a sturgeon; or again he went along the beach looking for food and he found a porpoise. Bluejay often went along the beach trying to find food, but he was always unlucky, for he found nothing, and often, while he was looking, suddenly it would begin to hail—big hailstones. Often he went out to gather mussels and tried to break them [[16]]off from the rocks, but he could not do it. They were stuck fast to the stones. So he gave up and went home. He cried a great deal. Often the Raven looked for food along the beach and found a seal. The others had nothing to eat except roots.

Thus these men who had not brought food to their families had now lost their women and children, their houses had been pulled down and taken away, and they had nothing to eat. So their Chief punished them for being stingy. [[17]]

[[Contents]]

Bluejay, the Imitator

[[19]]

Bluejay and his elder sister Ioí, with her five children, lived together in a house by the sea beach. Every morning they went out to walk along the beach, to see what the tide had washed up during the night that was good to eat. Sometimes they found fish, or a seal, and sometimes a whale. Some days when they found nothing, they dug clams on the flat, but some days they could get no clams, and so they were hungry. Up and down the shore lived their neighbors.

One day Bluejay said to his sister: “Let us go visiting; let us visit the Magpie.” She said, “Let it be so. We will go.”