Not many of the stories about birds now or formerly current among the American aborigines are of a pleasing character. They are fantastic myths for the most part, as appears from many of the incidents given elsewhere in this book; and often they are so wildly improbable, incoherent, and unbirdlike as to disgust rather than interest us. That is partly owing, no doubt, to our difficulty in taking the native point of view, and our ignorance of the significance the half-animal, half-human characters in the tales have to the redmen, with whom, in most cases, the startling narratives pass for veritable tribal history. Their stories are as foreign to our minds as is their “tum-tum” music to our ears. Now and then, however, we come across an understanding and pleasing legend, of purely native origin, and touched with poetic feeling.
A favorite story among the central Eskimos, for instance, is that of their race-mother Sedna, who was the daughter of a chief, and was wooed by a fulmar (a kind of northern petrel) who promised her, if she would marry him, a delightful life in his distant home. So she went away with him. But she had been ruefully deceived, and was cruelly mistreated. A year later her father went to pay her a visit; and discovering her misery he killed her husband and took his repentant daughter home. The other fulmars in the village followed them, mourning and crying for their murdered fellow, and fulmars continue to utter doleful cries to this day.
Another Eskimo tale relates that a loon told a poor blind boy that he could cure him of his affliction. So the boy crept after the bird to a lake, where the loon took him and dived with him into the water. Three times they repeated their submergence, the last time staying a long time under the water, but when the boy came to the surface after the third diving he had good eyesight. This seems one of the rare examples of a tale told simply for its own sake, and free of any esoteric significance.
A very pretty legend, current among the Eskimos of western Alaska, has been preserved for us by Edward W. Nelson,[101] who spent several years, late in the 19th century, in studying the ornithology and ethnology of the Bering Sea region. It relates to the redpolls, the most abundant and entertaining land-birds of Alaska, where it would be a surprisingly hard heart that was not touched by their companionship as winter closes down on a dreary landscape of snow-drifts. Let me quote Mr. Nelson’s words: