329 
So he came climbing up. 
When he had reached them, “Me first!” said the elder sister. 
“No! Wait; first comes your sister.” 
“Very well.” 
Then he took her on his back. 
“Now then, do not rub yourself directly against my robe. I think a 
great deal of my robe,” he told the young woman. 
The young woman wrapped herself very carefully in her clothes, and 
he climbed down with her. At last he had got her down. Then, before 
doing any more, the wolverine rolled himself over and over, like this, to 
wipe his robe clean where the woman had come into contact with it. 
Then that elder sister thought, “When he takes me down, I will dirty 
up his robe, the conceited fellow!” she thought of him. 
Then he came up again. 
When he had reached her, “Now then, sit carefully wrapped in your 
clothes. I think very highly of my robe,” he said. 
Then he took her on his back. 
And as he climbed down, because he went slowly and carefully, “Hurry 
up, wolverine! I am miserable with longing to set foot on my earth,” 
said the woman. 
********** He rolled over and flung himself down 
to the ground. 
“It is horrible, what you are doing to my robe! Did I not tell you that 
I valued my handsome robe!” he cried. 
As the woman fell, she broke her leg just above the knee. 
As the wolverine started to go away, the young woman said to him 
“Oho, wolverine, since you have thus given me a painful fall, let your 
robe needs forever be marked there * * * as long as there be, 
an earth!” she said to him; “And later, when mortal men grow into life, 
never shall they eat you; ********** ‘Wolverine,’ 
they will call you.” 
Then he went away. 
“Oh, little sister, take me where there is plenty of firewood,” she said 
to the other. 
So then her sister dragged her on her blanket-robe, taking her to a 
place where there was plenty of firewood. Then she made a lodge for them 
out of leaves, and then all the time the young woman gathered firewood, to 
keep up a fire for her sister, who was suffering from her leg and sleeping 
hardly at all; every morning she built a fire. At last she had been sick a 
long time; her wound would not heal. Then at one time, while her younger 
sister was gathering firewood, she took a knife and cut off her leg there 
where it was broken. The bone stuck far out. She whittled it with the 
knife, shaping it off small. When the young woman was coming home, she 
heard the sound of her elder sister chopping away at something. When she 
got near, the other stopped her work and covered it with her robe, to hide 
it. She could not see what her elder sister had been doing. 
But what the elder sister thought was this: “****♦**” 
she thought. 
Then presently, as the young woman continued to gather faggots, 
presently she suspected her elder sister, because she always stared at her 
with an unceasing smilej Presently, as she was gathering wood, a tomtit 
came and alighted here and there. 
