426 THE ESKIMO ABOUT BERING STRAIT [ETH. ANN. 18 
that he made things on earth so much like those in the sky that the 
shamans still pretend to replace animals on the earth by trips to the 
sky land. 
The first man made on the earth returned to the sky land, where the 
shades of shamans and people who are recompensed for a violent death 
also go; the Raven Father is believed still to live there. I was informed 
that the Eskimo about Norton sound place fragments of dried fish or 
other food in different places on the tundra as offerings to the Raven 
Father in the sky; in return for which he gives them fine weather. 
The Unalit say that to kill a raven will cause the Raven Father to 
become very angry and to send bad weather, and the lower Yukon 
Eskimo dislike and fear ravens as evil birds. 
The common mark symbolizing the raven is found upon all kinds of 
carvings, ornamental work, tools, implements, and utensils among the 
western Eskimo, as previously described and illustrated. On the eth- 
nological specimens obtained from Point Barrow and through Bering 
strait to Kuskokwim river, this mark is common. There is an ivory 
bodkin in the National Museum, brought from the mouth of Mackenzie 
river, which bears this mark, and I saw the same device tattooed on 
the forehead of a boy at Plover bay, Siberia (see figure 115). 
The Raven Father, who made the land and everything upon it, is the 
subject of many tales in which he is represented as benefiting man- 
kind. When he returned to the sky he left on earth children like him- 
self, and some of these are the subjects of numerous tales among the 
Eskimo and adjacent tribes of Tinné, in northern Alaska. These Raven 
children frequently figure in their tales as boasters or in other discredit- 
able and absurd ways, and while the ravens now living are thought to 
be descendants of the Raven Father, they have lost their magical 
powers. 
For a long time they were said to have retained their powers of 
changing back and forth at will from men to birds, but gradually lost 
these powers until they became ordinary ravens as we see them today. 
Many things, such as physical features of the landscape, etc, con- 
nected with raven tales are pointed out as evidence of the Raven 
Father’s former presence when the earth was new. Below Paimut on 
the Yukon is a large block of stone resting near the water’s edge which 
they say was dropped there by the Raven Father after he had made the 
earth. When he had placed it there he told the people of the Yukon 
that whenever fish became scarce they must tie an inflated bladder to 
this stone and throw both into the river, whereupon fish would become 
plentiful. They say that one year, when fish were very scarce, the 
shamans did this and when the stone and the bladder struck the water 
the latter immediately sank out of sight and the stone floated like 
a piece of dry wood some distance down the river; then it returned 
upstream of its own volition, went to its former place on the bank and 
fish immediately became very numerous. 
