Kutchin

(map)

A man called the Mariner (Etroetchokren) was the first person to build a canoe. One day, he rocked it side to side, causing waves which flooded the earth and floundering the canoe. He scrambled into a giant hollow straw that floated past, caulked up the ends, and floated safely until the flood dried. He landed on a high mountain, called the Place of the Old Man today, near Fort MacPherson in the Rockies. The Mariner straddled a rapid stretch of the Yukon River and, dipping with his hands, drew out dead bodies of men as they floated past, but he found none living. The only living thing he saw was a raven high on a rock, gorged with food and fast asleep. The Mariner climbed to the raven, grabbed it, and stuck it in his sack. The raven begged not to be cast down, saying the man would find no other surviving men without the raven's help. The man dropped the bag anyway, and the bird was dashed to pieces. But though the man searched far and wide, he could find nothing else living except a loach and a pike sunning themselves on the mud. He went back to the raven, reassembled its bones, and blew on them to restore the flesh and return the raven to life. They returned to the beach, and the raven told the man to bore a hole in the belly of the pike, while it did the same to the loach. A crowd of men emerged from the hole in the pike, and women came out of the loach.

Frazer, 1919, 315-316.

Long ago the waters flowed all over the world. One family made a big raft and got all kinds of animals on it. There was no land, only water, and they wanted to make a world. The man of the family tied a rope around a beaver and sent him down to find the bottom, but he got only halfway and drowned. The man then tied a string around a muskrat and sent him down; he reached the bottom and got a little mud on his hands, but he drowned. The man took the mud from the muskrat's hands into his own palm and let it dry, then crumbled it to dust. This he blew out all over the waters to make the world.

Ferdinand Schmitter, Upper Yukon Native Customs and Folk-Lore, Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol. 56 no. 4 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1910), 21.