154 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY Lbull. ^9 



Nowadays, when a man wants to become a shaman, he has to cut 

 the tongue of a land otter and fast for eight days. You can tell a 

 shaman who has been fasting a great deal because his eyes become 

 very sharp. 



After he had shown all of the spirits, they said, "We will take you 

 to your town any time you want to go." Then they took him to his 

 own town. They had to cover him up again. 



The people of S!awA'n's village were always looking for him, and 

 one day four men in a canoe saw something far out on the shore 

 which looked very strange. A number of sea gulls were flying 

 around it. Going closer, they saw the shaman lying there on a long 

 sandy beach, the gulls around him. They did not know of any 

 sandy bay at that point, and said that it was the shaman that brought 

 it up there. They then took him into the canoe and brought him 

 over. He was so thin that he appeared to have fasted a long time. 

 After they got him home the spirits began mentioning their names, 

 saying, "I am Spirit of the Sea; I am Spirit of the Land," etc. Every 

 time a spirit mentioned his name, the })eople would start its songs. 



This is the last thing that happened in the Raven story. From this 

 time on everything is about spirits (yek) over and over again. Very 

 few people believed in Nas-cA'ki-yel. Most believed in the spirits. 

 From the time that these come into the story you hear little about 

 Raven because people had so much more faith in spirits. You 

 notice that in every Tlingit town in Alaska there are shamans, and 

 years ago, when a shaman died, there was always one right after him, 

 and he was always of the same family. It is through these that the 

 Raven story has been getting less and less. 



32. KAKE'Q!"TE'^ 



A Hima man named Kake'q !"te and his wife were paddling along 

 in a canoe about midnight in search of seals, and he kept hearing a 

 noise around his head like that made by a bird. Finally lie hit the 

 creature with his hand and knocked it into the canoe. It was shaped 

 like a bird, only with eyelids hanging far over, and its name is Sleep 

 (Ta). He gave this to his wife saying, "Here, you can "keep this for 

 your own." So she gave it to her relatives, who built a house called 

 Sleep house (Ta hit). All the poles in it were carved to resemble 

 this bird. 



The man got very tired after that without being able to sleep, until 

 at last he ran away into the forest. He walked along there, came to 

 a big glacier, and walked along upon that. After he had traveled 

 for some time he came across a small creek in which he discovered 



a According to Katislum, he belonged to the L!uk!nAxA'di. But see story 104. 



