Among the Wyandots a story was told, in the seventeenth century, of a boy whose father was killed and eaten by a bear, and his mother by the Great Hare. He was small, but of prodigious strength. He climbed a tree, like Jack of the Bean-Stalk, until he reached heaven.
"He set his snares for game, but when he got up at night to look at them he found everything on fire. His sister told him he had caught the sun unawares, and when the boy, Chakabech, went to see, so it was. But he dared not go near enough to let him out. But by chance he found a little mouse, and blew upon her until she grew so big" (again the mastodon) "that she could set the sun free, and he went on his way. But while he was held in the snare, day failed down here on earth."
It was the age of darkness[2]
The Dog-Rib Indians, far in the northwest of America, near the Esquimaux, have a similar story: Chakabech becomes Chapewee. He too climbs a tree, but it is in pursuit
[1. Tylor's "Early History of Mankind," p. 848.
2. Le Jeune (1637), in "Rélations des Jesuits dans la Nouvelle France," vol. i, p. 54.]
{p. 183}
of a squirrel, until he reaches heaven. He set a snare made of his sister's hair and caught the sun. "The sky was instantly darkened. Chapewee's family said to him, 'You must have done something wrong when you were aloft, for we no longer enjoy the light of day.' 'I have,' replied he, 'but it was unintentionally.' Chapewee sent a number of animals to cut the snare, but the intense heat reduced them all to ashes." At last the ground-mole working in the earth cut the snare but lost its sight, "and its nose and teeth have ever since been brown as if burnt."[1]
The natives of Siberia represented the mastodon as a great mole burrowing in the earth and casting up ridges of earth--the sight of the sun killed him.
These sun-catching legends date back to a time when the races of the earth had not yet separated. Hence we find the same story, in almost the same words, in Polynesia and America.