24 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VOL. V. 



efforts to attract attention, the little woodpecker got the end of his tail 

 burnt, and this explains why it is to this day coal-coloured. 



COMMENTS. 



This is one of the shortest of the Carrier legends. It is either an idle 

 tale, to while away the long night hours of a hyperborean winter ; an 

 allegory concealing under a circuitous phraseology a truth of more or less 

 importance or some cosmogonical phenomenon, or again a legend to be 

 considered as a feeble echo of a historical event. The first hypothesis 

 is, to my mind, entirely gratuitous. Aboriginal tales do not, as a rule, 

 web their fallacious thread around a moral thesis of such an extraordinary 

 description as that pointed out in our myth. There is no lack among our 

 Indians of fabulous stories which are real meaningless tales ; it would 

 suffice to reproduce one here to make the difference between them and 

 the above plain beyond dispute. If an allegory, I would ask : Where 

 have our people gone for the subject matter, sodomy, to be thereby re- 

 proved? They know the crime neither in name nor in deed. Or, again, 

 what natural phenomenon could be said to be thereby hinted at ? There 

 remains the third hypothesis which may be a mere supposition, yet a 

 supposition with something like a basis and not a little probability in its 

 favour. 



The very title of the story is, in the native tongue, grammatically mys- 

 terious and mythologically suggestive. Intsi/ 'qa hzvotdtifkan, the name 

 it receives in the various versions, means literally : " He (or it) burned 

 down (a country or a town or the universe^) against (i.e., in opposition 

 to, in punishment of) the Red Woodpecker." Hzvotdtifkan is a transitive 

 verb and as such it must have not only a subject but a complement, ex- 

 pressed or implied. What is the subject? Is it Fw/Z^rt^", the impersonal 

 Deity of the ancient Carriers ? It would seem that none other could be 

 imagined. As for the implied complement, it must refer to some locality, 

 not the whole universe, since the text affirms positively that some men 

 escaped from the conflagration. We are thus warranted in translating 

 the title : A country was burned down by the Deity in punishment for 

 the Red Woodpecker's misdeeds. 



Barring the mention of the bird's name, which is here evidently sym- 

 bolical, I would ask in all frankness : Does history record the burning of 

 any other inhabited region than that of the famous cities of the plain, 



^ Were not an extent of country, town or district, implied, the verb would be Mifkan, not 

 hivotsttfkan. 



''Lit., "that which is on hij^h." See "The Western Denes," Proceedings Can. Inst., Vol. 

 VII, p. 157- 



