Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 10 (North American).djvu/53

Rh The Eskimo tell how men with dogs once pursued a bear far out on the ice; suddenly the bear began to rise into the air, his pursuers followed, and this group became the constellation which we name Orion. A like story is sometimes told of the Great Bear (Ursa Major). Harsher is the tale which tells of the coming of Venus: "He who Stands and Listens"—for the sun s companion is a man to the Eskimo. An old man, so the story goes, was sealing near the shore; the noise of children playing in a cleft of rock frightened the seals away; and at last, in his anger, he ordered the cleft to close over them. When their parents returned from hunting, all they could do was to pour a little blood down a fissure which had been left, but the imprisoned children soon starved. They then pursued the old man, but he shot up into the sky and became the luminous planet which is seen low in the west when the light begins to return after the wintry dark.

The Eskimo do not greatly trouble themselves with thoughts as to the beginnings of the world as a whole; rather they take it for granted, quite unspeculatively. There is, however, an odd Greenlandic tale of how earth dropped down from the heavens, soil and stones, forming the lands we know. Babies came forth—earth-born—and sprawled about among the dwarf willows; and there they were found by a man and a woman (none knows whence these came), and the woman made clothes for them, and so there were people; and the man stamped upon the earth, whence sprang, each from its tiny mound, the dogs that men need. At first there was no death; neither was there any sun. Two old women debated, and one said, "Let us do without light, if so we can be without death"; but the other said, "Nay, let us have both light and death!"—and as she spoke, it was so.

The Far North has also a widely repeated story of a deluge that destroyed most of the earth s life, as well as another widespread account of the birth of the different races of mankind—for at first all men were Eskimo—from the union of a