boas] COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TSIMSHIAN MYTHOLOGY 571 



tale is in part related to the GunaxnesEmg"a'd story as discussed on 

 p. 835. The incidents of the arrival of Raven at the house of the 

 Salmon chief are about the same as those of the arrival of Gunax- 

 nesEmg'a'd at the house of the Killer Whales. 



The tale of the Eagle and Raven gathering black cod and red cod 

 respectively is closely related either to the tale of the origin of the 

 tides, or to that of the Deluge, after which the fish were left dry on the 

 beach. This connection is found in two Tlingit versions (Tla, T16), 

 in the Haida version Skrf, and in the Bellabella version H 5. Still 

 another group of talcs are those of Raven and his companion, which 

 are combined here in one group (No. 29), but which consist of a 

 number of distinct elements, some of which occur also without this 

 connection. In some cases the tale of Raven killing the Deer is 

 made part of the tale of Raven's companion. In that form Deer is 

 induced to cross a chasm, falls down, and is eaten by Raven. 



Setting aside these minor groups, I am under the impression that 

 no order can be brought into the northern Raven tradition. 



The remaining incidents of the Raven tale have been recorded only 

 once or twice. The very large number of these incidents, which are 

 scattered through the tales in a most irregular manner, shows clearly 

 that in none of the cycles as recorded is there any prescribed sequence 

 of incidents. The disconnected character of the single adventures 

 makes it very probable that no such regular secpuence ever existed. 



The great variety of individual incidents that compose the Raven 

 myth from the regions where it has been most fully recorded suggest 

 that there has been a tendency to incorporate in it any tale that 

 would fit into the series of adventures. 



This point appears also quite clearly in our Tsimshian series. The 

 tale "How Raven makes the Princess Sick and then Cures her" does 

 not form ordinarily a part of the Raven cycle, but it belongs, rather, 

 to the Coyote tales of the Southern plateaus. On the other hand, the 

 story of the magical arrow of the Wolf family (p. 306), the story of 

 Plucking Out Eyes (p. 154), the meeting of the wild animals (p. 106), 

 Sucking Intestines (p. 214), not to mention the complicated tales 

 included in the Tlingit version T16, have been made part of the Raven 

 legend among the various tribes of the coast, although many of them 

 occur also independently. 



While in the Transformer tales of the Kwakiutl and of other tribes 

 farther to the south a fairly definite sequence is preserved by the 

 sharp localization of the tales which refer to a series of places that 

 the Transformer visited on his travels from north to south or in other 

 directions, no such regularity has been observed in the northern group. 



Among the various versions recorded, the Tlingit tale Tib takes an 

 exceptional position, because the narrator has embodied in it a very 

 large number of short explanatory tales that do not appear in any of 

 the other Raven cycles, and also a series of very complex tales which 



