630 TSIMSHIAN MYTHOLOGY I itii. ann. 31 



Raven was flying about over the waters, and saw no land except a flat rock, on which 

 the supernatural beings lay stretched out. [Loon lived in NAfikilsLas's house. He 

 would go out and shout, and sit down again. An old woman seated by the fire asked 

 why he was acting thus. He replied that the supernatural beings had no place in 

 which to settle. Then the old man promised to attend toitSki>.] Raven pierced the 

 sky and found a five-row town. The chief's daughter had a baby, whose body Raven 

 entered Ska. The grandfather pulled the infant to make it grow quickly. When all 

 were asleep, Raven would come out of the skin and gouge out people's eyes, which 

 he roasted in the fire. The being rock from the hips down saw him when the eyes of 

 the people of four towns were lost. He told the chief. The people stood outside in a 

 line and sang for the child. The person who held him let him drop, and he fell to our 

 world, turning to the right. He drifted on the water, and heard some one say, "Your 

 mighty grandfather invites you. " The fourth time when he heard the voice, he 

 looked through a hole in his blanket, and saw the grebe, who dived after he had spoken. 

 He drifted against a stem of kelp with two heads, stepped on it, and it was a house- 

 pole of stone. On descending he found a house, inside an old man white as a sea gull, 

 who took out of the innermost of a set of five boxes two round [cylindrical] objects — 

 one black, one covered with shining spots. He said, "I am you; that is you, " refer- 

 ring to something slim and blue that was walking on the screens whose ends pointed 

 toward each other in the rear of the house. He told the boy to place the shining 

 object on the water first, then the black one, to bite off part of each and spit it on the 

 other. He did so, but in the wrong order, and the part that he had spit on the black 

 stone rebounded. He now went back to the black one, bit a part off. and spit it upon 

 the rest, where it stuck. Then he bit off a part of the pebble with shining points and 

 spit it upon the rest. It stuck to it. This became the trees. The second stone ex- 

 panded and became Queen Charlotte Islands. The first became mainland Ska. 



Here should be added the incident described in Sk 8.74, according to which, after 

 the second deluge, the ancestors of the Haida families were seated on reefs that 

 emerged from the waters. This incident is also referred to in Hai 5.307 (Skidegate 

 version). 



The Masset version opens with the statement that in the beginning- 

 there was no land. Then there was a little thing on the ocean on 

 which Raven alighted. He made the mainland and Queen Charlotte 

 Islands out of it Ma 293. 



A version given by Mr. Harrison x is very confused and evidently 

 not a faithful record of what the Haida told, but a generalized state- 

 ment of what the author remembered of the tale. Christian influence 

 is brought out very clearly in his use of the terms hetgwaulana (xetg u 

 la'na "the one below") and shaming etlagidas (sa uaii i'Lagidas "chief 

 above"), which, according to Swanton (8.14), are the names used for 

 Christian concepts. The tale recorded by Mr. Harrison is based on 

 the Haida version. Mr. Harrison begins his account with the state- 

 ment that the chief below was cast from the region of the clouds into 

 the depths below, but this part may well be omitted. 



In the beginning Raven lived in the gray clouds and had no place on which he 

 could rest, the whole earth being covered with water. He beat the water with his 

 wings, and the spray was transformed into tiny rocks, on which he rested. [In 

 Hai 6.25 he creates lj,nd by the flapping of his wings.] These expanded and be- 

 came Queen Charlotte Islands, and finally soil was formed on them. 



' See p. 625, footnote 2. 



