HOW WORLD BEGAN

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 March 1932, Page 8

HOW WORLD BEGAN

QUEER OLD INDIAN ACCOUNT John Fredson, a full-blooded Alaskan Indian, gives this queer old Indian account of the beginning of the earth. “There was once, a long time ago, a man out on a raft on the water. There was no land anywhere—just water. The man drifted around for many days. He began to think for himself: ‘Now, I can’t float here always. I’ve got to find some land somewhere. So he sent down the beaver to see if he could reach bottom under the water. The beaver came up, but he said he couldn’t reach the bottom, the water was so deep. Then

the man sent down the other water animals, one at a time. They stayed down as long as they could, but none could reach the bottom. All this took a long time, and the man began to get worried. He thought of the muskrat and sent him down. The, muskrat stayed down a long time, and then he came up, all out of breath, and said: ‘Master, I couldn’t find the land.’ Then the man said to him: ‘You must touch the bottom. I’ll tie a string around you so I can pull you up if you stay down too long, and you dive down again.’ So the man put the cord around the muskrat, and

when he had caught his breath he dived down once more. He stayed down for a very long time, so that the master thought he must be drowned. The man pulled the string and hauled in the muskrat. Sure enough, the muskrat had stayed under the water so long that he was unconscious, and he couldn't say whether he had found bottom or not. But the man looked at him closely and on the edge of his mouth he saw a little crumb of mud, so he knew the animal had reached the bottom. Then the man

took the mud carefully in his fingers and rolled it into a tiny ball. Then he kept rolling it and the ball kept getting bigger and bigger. It grew to be enormous. In fact, it grew to )e exactly the size of the world, and when it got to be that size the man stepped off the raft to the dry land and the world had begun.”