S TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [ V^OL. V. 



maidens I One of them coming up to him said : " Our father is terrible 

 and our mother, too, is terrible ; they will kill you." Then the youngest 

 said to him: "It is I whom people call Su-ne-n^/rz, the skillful con- 

 cealer." Therefore she took the child up and hid him under one of her 

 wings' feathers. 



When her father came home, he remarked : " How is that ? It smells 

 of gstas"!" To which she made answer, saying: "We have seen 

 nobody." But the father-thunder set upon inspecting each of her wing 

 feathers successively. As soon as he got to the one concealing the child, 

 who was no other than gstas^, the young girl slipped him off so 

 dexterously under the feather just examined that her father did not see 

 him. 



Then the thunder-bird began to send forth his bolts. The whole 

 mountain was soon trembling under his peals and his bolts were for a 

 while falling right and left on the rocks of the mountain. It was very 

 terrible. Little by little, however, the father-thunder calmed himself, 

 and the child, whose presence was no more suspected, was at liberty to 

 come out of his place of concealment. 



In his agitation the thunder-bird had strewn the top of the mountain 

 with a large numb2r of his feathers. These the child picked up, made a 

 bundle of them and set out to return to the house of his father-in-law, 

 who by that time had got home. 



The child therefore descended to the base of the mountain and followed 

 the shore of the lake until he got back to the lodge of the old man. 

 His father-in-law was immensely surprised to see him arrive, inasmuch 

 as he had for a time thought him dead. "Thus it is that this one^ 

 torments people ! " said the child entering the lodge, and then he cast 

 the bundle of feathers down in the fire-place, the ashes of which, floating 

 up in clouds, fell back on the old man. For the child was angry indeed. 



Some time afterwards the old man said to his son-in-law : " Let us fly 

 one against the other^." To which the child made answer, saying : " It 

 is you who make the proposition, therefore commence yourself." The 

 old man transformed himself into a grey jay*^, and set out to fly 



^Tliis whole episode is substantially found in a separate legend of an Eastern Dene tribe. 

 *The introduction of gstas here is evidently an interpolation. 

 ' So said my narratrix. 

 * That is the old man ; expressive of spite. 



^ JV/io />e fgal'sti/M, that is "let us see which one of us can fly the best." 

 ^Perisoreus Canadensis, a bird constantly laughed at by the natives, and synonymous among 

 them with stupidity and vain talk. 



