Ixxvi INTRODUCTION. 



was formed a floating island, on which Ataentsic fell; 

 and here, being pregnant, she was soon delivered of a 

 daughter, who in turn bore two boys, whose paternity 

 is unexplained. They were called Taouscaron and 

 Jouskeha, and presently fell to blows, Jouskeha killing 

 his brother with the horn of a stag. The back of the 

 tortoise grew into a world full of verdure and life ; and 

 Jouskeha, with his grandmother, Ataentsic, ruled over 

 its destinies.^ 



He is the Sun ; she is the Moon. He is beneficent ; 

 but she is malignant, like the female demon of the Algon- 

 quins. They have a bark house, made like those of the 

 Iroquois, at the end of the earth, and they often come 

 to feasts and dances in the Indian villages. Jouskeha 

 raises corn for himself, and makes plentiful harvests for 

 mankind. Sometimes he is seen, thin as a skeleton, 

 with a spike of shrivelled corn in his hand, or greedily 

 gnawing a human limb ; and then the Indians know that 

 a grievous famine awaits them. He constantly interposes 

 between mankind and the malice of his wicked grand- 

 mother, whom, at times, he soundly cudgels. It was he 



1 The above is the version of the story given by Brebeuf, Relation 

 des Hurons, 1036, 86 (Craraoisy). No two Indians told it precisely 

 alike, though nearly all the Hurons and Iroquois agreed as to its es- 

 sential points. Compare Vanderdonck, Cusick, Sagard, and other writ- 

 ers According to Vanderdonck, Ataentsic became mother of a deer, 

 a bear, and a wolf, by whom she afterwards bore all the other animals, 

 mankind included. Bre'beuf found also among the Hurons a tradition 

 inconsistent with that of Ataentsic, and bearing a trace of Algonquin 

 origin. It declares, that, in the beginning, a man, a fox, and a skunk 

 found themselves together on an island, and that the man made the 

 world out of mud brought him by the skunk. 



The Delawares, an Algonquin tribe, seem to have borrowed some- 

 what of the Iroquois cosmogony, since they believed that the earth w;is 

 formed on the back of a tortoise. 



According to some, Jouskeha became the father of the human race ; 

 but, in the third generation, a deluge destroyed his posterity, so t.'iat it 

 was necessary to transform animals into men. — Charlevoix, I II. 3 15. 



