The people greeted him with shouts of delight. They were so happy they danced and sang, and prepared a great feast in his honor. They were so grateful to him they couldn’t thank him enough for bringing that daylight.
The crow told them that if he had taken the big daylight, it would never be dark in Alaska, even in winter, but he said that the big daylight would have been too heavy for him to carry.
The people have always been thankful to the crow since then, and never try to kill him.
Long ago, in a big village on Shismarief Inlet, lived a chief who had one child, a daughter.
The chief’s brother died and left a little boy, without any one to take care of him, so the chief took the boy to live with him.
The boy and girl were cousins, and they had very happy times playing together.
One day they had been out making snowballs, and stopped to shake the snow off their parkas before coming into the house. The Eskimo parka is a sort of middy blouse with a hood attached to it. In winter these parkas are usually made of reindeer skin, with a big ruff of fur around the edge of the hood to protect the face. The best fur to trim the hood is that of the wolverine, for it does not collect moisture from the breath.
The children stamped their feet and brushed the snow from each other with small flat ivory sticks shaped for that purpose. In doing this the boy broke the beautiful string of beads which the girl wore around her neck.
Now these were very precious beads; and the boy was afraid of his uncle, and did not like to tell what he had done, but he bravely took his little cousin by the hand and went into the house trembling with fear. Walking up to the chief he said, “Uncle, I am sorry but I broke the precious beads.”
His uncle was furious. “How did you do it?” he asked, and the boy told him.
“Now,” said the uncle, “I am going to kill you for that. Those beads were my sign of chief. Now you have broken the beads, the people will say I am no longer chief, and will make some one else chief instead of me. You will have to die.”
He took the boy out of the house and led him to the kasga. There were many people in the kasga, but he drove them all out; then he took off the little boy’s clothes, and went away, leaving him all alone to die of cold and hunger. That cruel uncle closed the door, putting heavy pieces of wood against it, so that the little fellow could not push it open, and then went up to the top of the kasga, where he took the skin cover off from the round window hole, to let the cold air in. After that he went away.