Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/358

348 round and heard his cry, and, because he was a good warrior, sent him help. He made the facehere creeper grow, and again the poor man sprang up from the ground near his house, where he had lain down in despair. He took his canoe and made a noose of the creeper. It was the bad season, when the sun is dull and heavy; so up he came, half asleep and tired, nor looked about him, but put his head into the noose. He pulled and jerked, but Itu had made it too strong. The man built his house—the sun cried and cried, till the island of Savai was nearly drowned; but not till the last stone was laid, was he suffered to resume his career. None can break the facehere. It is the Itu's cord.

Other versions of this episode in the great Maui-myth have been taken down in the Pacific Islands, and a like variety is found in the corresponding tales from North America. Among the Ojibwas, the Sun-Catcher is evidently the same personage as the Boy swallowed by the Fish in the last group of stories. At the time when the animals reigned in the earth, they had killed all but a girl and her little brother, and these two were living in fear and seclusion. The boy never grew bigger than a little child, and his sister used to take him out with her when she went to get food for the lodge-fire, for he was too little to leave alone; a big bird might have flown away with him. One day she made him a bow and arrows, and told him to hide where she had been chopping, and when the snow-birds came to pick the worms out of the wood, he was to shoot one. That day he tried in vain to kill one, but the next, toward nightfall, she heard his little footsteps on the snow; he brought in a bird, and told his sister she was to take off the skin and to put half the bird at a time into the pottage, for till then men had not begun to eat animal food, but had lived on vegetables alone. At last the boy had killed ten birds, and his sister made him a little coat of the skins. "Sister," said he one day, "are we all alone in the world? Is there nobody else living?" Then she told him that those they feared, and who had destroyed their relatives,