When Raven-Boy was born he grew very rapidly. He was running about when he was only a few days old. He cried for the sun which was in the skin bag, hanging on the rafters. Raven was fond of the boy so he let him play with the sun; yet he was afraid Raven-Boy would lose the sun, so he watched him. When Raven-Boy began to play out of doors, he cried and begged for the sun. Raven said, “No.” Then Raven-Boy cried more than ever. At last Raven gave him the sun in the house. Raven-Boy played with it a long while. When no one was looking, he ran quickly out of the house. He ran to the tree, put on his raven mask and coat, and flew far away with the sun in the skin bag. When Raven-Boy was far up in the sky, he heard Raven call, “Do not hide the sun. Let it out of the bag. Do not keep it always dark.” Raven thought the boy had stolen it for himself.
Raven-Boy flew to the place where the sun belonged. He tore off the skin covering and put the sun in its place. Then he saw a broad path leading far away. He followed it to the side of a hole fringed with short, bright grass. He remembered that Raven had said, “Do not keep it always dark,” therefore he made the sky turn, with all the stars and the sun. Thus it is now sometimes dark and sometimes light.
Raven-Boy picked some of the short, bright grass by the edge of the sky hole and stuck it into the sky. This is the morning star.
Raven-Boy went down to the earth. The people were glad to see him. They said, “What has become of Man who went into the skyland with Raven?” Now this was the first time that Raven-Boy had heard of Man. He started to fly up into the sky, but he could get only a small distance above the earth. When he found he could not get back to the sky, Raven-Boy wandered to the second village, where lived the men who had come from the pod of the beach pea. Raven-Boy there married a wife and he had many children. But the children could not fly to the sky. They had lost the magic power. Therefore the ravens now flutter over the tundras like other birds.
THE FLOOD
Tlingit (Wrangell)
LONG, long ago, in the days of the animal people, Raven-at-the-head-of-Nass became angry. He said, “Let rain pour down all over the world. Let people die of starvation.” At once it became so stormy people could not get food, so they began to starve. Their canoes were also broken up, their houses fell in upon them, and they suffered very much. Then Nas-ca-ki-yel, Raven-at-the-head-of-Nass, asked for his jointed dance hat. When he put it on water began pouring out of the top of it. It is from Raven that the Indians obtained this kind of a hat.
When the water rose to the house floor, Raven and his mother climbed upon the lowest retaining timber. This house we are speaking of, although it looked like a house to them, was really part of the world. It had eight rows of retaining timbers.
When Raven and his mother climbed to a higher timber, the people of the world were climbing into the hills. Then Raven and his mother climbed to the fourth timber; by that time the water was half-way up the mountains. When the house was nearly full of water, Raven’s mother got into the skin of a cax. To this very day Tlingits do not eat the cax because it was Raven’s mother. Then Raven got into the skin of a white bird with copper-colored bill. Now the cax is a diver and stayed upon the surface of the water. But Raven flew to the very highest cloud and hung there by his bill. But his tail was in the water.