Page:Myths and Legends of British North America.djvu/12

 laden with berries, when the forests full of game, and life was easy. Therefore there must be two Powers, one strong and ugly, one beautiful and good, always battling against each other—the universal human belief in both good and evil.

Indian myths and legends are the efforts of the red men to answer these questions, as well as to interest and amuse each other in the long winter evenings when the fires burned brightly in the tepees and the carved plumstone dice were thrown. Men forgot their games and women the beading of the moccasin, while children listened intently, as the story tellers of the camp related, with dramatic gestures, stories of the Days of the Grandfathers, in the beginning of the Newness of Things. Nothing was too large or too small to come within the bounds of their beliefs, or within the play of their fancy.

As in all other volumes of this series, only the quaint, the pure, and the beautiful, has been taken from the tales of the Indians. Any one wishing pure ethnology, good and bad together, would do better to go to ethnological reports.

The Indians omitted many stories we wish they had told. There are few references to the snowy mountains, probably because of their belief that all above the snowline was governed by vague, misty, but powerful