Chipewyan

(map)

In the beginning of time, in September, there was a great snow. A mouse nibbled a hole in the leather bag which contained the sun's heat, and the heat escaped and melted all the snow in an instant. The waters rose to cover even the highest mountains. One old man had foreseen the flood and warned everybody, but the others had thought to escape to the hills; they drowned in the flood. The old man had prepared a canoe and survived, rescuing animals he came across. After a while he sent, in turn, the beaver, otter, muskrat, and duck to find land. Only the duck returned, with some mud in its bill. The old man cast the mud on the water and blew on it, making solid land.

Vitaliano, 1973, 170; Frazer, 1919, 312.

This story was told by Tsinnayine, near Great Slave Lake, in 1862.

One winter, it snowed and snowed so much that only the tops of the tallest firs were visible. It was unbearable. All the animals left for the sky looking for heat. They knew that they had to hurry or perish from the cold.

The squirrel, being the smallest, climbed to the top of one of those tall trees and made a hole in the sky by which he entered heaven. That hole is the sun. Astounded by this deed, everyone declared that the squirrel should be a grand chief. The other animals followed the squirrel. One came too close to the heat and burned his fur, which is why it is now yellow.

So the squirrel created day. But the bear said to the squirrel, "If it is always day, how will you hunt?" He spread himself out like a thick blanket over the sky hole, and once again it became night. So the bear made night. He is black because he likes the darkness of night and lives under the earth.

All of the elements which fell on earth, good and bad, hung in skins from the branches of a large tree on an island. Rain, snow, fair weather, storms, cold, and heat were kept there. But the bear was mean. He and his son hoarded that heat, camping at the base of the tree to keep it for themselves.

"Which of us can get the heat?" said the animals to each other. "Who is strong enough to fight against this ferocious bear?"

The reindeer, harmless and light-footed, presented himself. He swam to the tree and seized the bag before the slow-moving bear had a chance to catch him. As the reindeer swam away with the heat, the bear launched his canoe and pursued. But just as he was about to catch the reindeer, his oar broke, and he could go no further. The mouse, working towards the common goal of allowing the heat to be shared, had eaten away at the inside of the paddle.

This accident gave the animals time to run away with the heat. The sack was very heavy. Pairs of animals took turns carrying it suspended from a stick between them. They had far to go to reach the lower earth, and they had to camp many times. At the campfire one night, the mouse, whose shoe was in tatters, decided to cut a little piece of skin from the sack to mend her shoe.

The hole she cut allowed the heat to escape. It covered the earth with such intensity that it made all the snow melt. The water grew and grew into a flood which covered even the tallest mountains.

A little old man with white hair had predicted this and suggested that they all work together to build a large boat. But everyone had laughed at him. "Make it yourself," they said. "We can always go to the mountains, where the waters will never reach us."

But they were wrong; the waters did reach them, and they all perished. The water rose above the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains. There was no more earth. All the men, all the animals, all the birds, perished.

As for the little old man, he had built a large canoe by himself, and as he sailed about, he rescued pairs of each animal as he came to them. That man was called Etsie, grandfather, or Ennedhekwi, old man.

The canoe was too crowded to support all the animals for long. All the good swimmers dived to find earth underneath the water, but the water was too deep.

The eagle flew off looking for earth, but he came back without having found any. Then the turtledove took off. She flew for a whole day and returned exhausted and unsuccessful. The next day she went again. She came back exhausted that night, but she held a piece of evergreen. She had seen the tops of the trees and had rested there.

Encouraged by this, all the aquatic animals decided to try again. The muskrat ran out of breath before he found anything. The otter stayed very long under water, but when she reappeared at the surface half-dead, she said, "Nothing, Nothing." The little duck, in his turn, dived and returned with a little bit of mud in his feet. He raised and remade earth. All the animals cried, "Rankanli only is a great man, a chief."

Emile Petitot, Traditions Indiennes du Canada Nord-Ouest (Paris: Maisonneuve Freres et Ch. LeClerc, 1886), 373-378.

A rich youth and his four nephews sailed far across the sea to seek the hand of a fair damsel who lived there. But she would not have him, so he prepared to leave. He and his nephews were prepared to shove off from shore, and many of the villagers had come to see them off. One woman with an infant in her arms said, "If they want a little girl, why not take this one of mine?" The rich young man heard her, extended his paddle and told her to put the infant on it, and placed the infant next to him in the canoe. The girl whom he had asked to marry came down to get water, but she began sinking in the mud. As she cried for help, the young man said it was her own fault, and she soon sank out of sight. The girl's mother saw this, and to avenge her death brought some tame brown bears to the water's edge and, holding their tails, told them to raise a strong wind, hoping in this way to drown the rich youth. The bears began furiously digging, raising great waves. The young man's nephews drowned, as did all inhabitants of the village except the infant's mother and her husband. The young man, though, had a magical white stone which, when he threw it ahead of him, clove a smooth path through the billows. Then he threw a harpoon at the crest of a wave. When it hit, the wave became a mountain, and the harpoon rebounded and stuck in the sky, where medicine-men can see it today. Land had been formed again, and the youth found himself in a spruce forest. Turning to the infant, he found that she had become a radiant woman. He married her and repopulated the drowned earth. The couple from his wife's village became the ancestors of the people overseas.

Frazer, 1919, 313-314.

A man survived the flood in the one remaining dry spot. Asked to end the flood, he drank up all the water. The earth was then too dry, and he created rivers.

The Right Rev. Bishop Lofthouse, "Chipewyan Stories," Transactions of the Canadian Institute 10 (1913), 43-44.