24 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [Vou. V.

efforts to attract attention, the little woodpecker got the end of his tail
burnt, and this explains why it is to this day coal-coloured.

COMMENTS.

This is one of the shortest of the Carrier legends. It is either an idle
tale, to while away the long night hours of a hyperborean winter; an
allegory concealing under a circuitous phraseology a truth of more or less
importance or some cosmogonical phenomenon, or again a legend to be
considered as a feeble echo of a historical event. The first hypothesis
is, to my mind, entirely gratuitous. Aboriginal tales do not, as a rule,
web their fallacious thread around a moral thesis of such an extraordinary
description as that pointed out in our myth. There is no lack among our
Indians of fabulous stories which are real meaningless tales; it would
suffice to reproduce one here to make the difference between them and
the above plain beyond dispute. If an allegory, 1 would ask: Where
have our people gone for the subject matter, sodomy, to be thereby re-
proved? They know the crime neither in name nor in deed. Or, again,
what natural phenomenon could be said to be thereby hinted at? There
remains the third hypothesis which may be a mere supposition, yet a
supposition with something like a basis and not a little probability in its
favour.

The very title of the story is, in the native tongue, grammatically mys-
terious and mythologically suggestive. Jutzz7’ga hwwotati7kan, the name
it receives in the various versions, means literally: “He (or it) burned
down (a country or a town or the universe!) against (ze, in opposition
to, in punishment of) the Red Woodpecker.” Azwotati7 kan is a transitive
verb and as such it must have not only a subject but a complement, ex-
pressed or implied. What isthe subject? Is it Yuttare?, the impersonal
Deity of the ancient Carriers? It would seem that none other could be
imagined. As for the implied complement, it must refer to some locality,
not the whole universe, since the text affirms positively that some men
escaped from the conflagration. We are thus warranted in translating
the title: A country was burned down by the Deity in punishment for
the Red Woodpecker’s misdeeds.

Barring the mention of the bird’s name, which is here evidently sym-
bolical, I would ask in all frankness : Does history record the burning of
any other inhabited region than that of the famous cities of the plain,

* Were not an extent of country, town or district, implied, the verb would be /aféy’4an, not
hwotatiy kan.

*Lit., ‘that which ison high.” See ‘‘The Western Dénés,” Proceedings Can. Inst., Vol.
VII, p. 157.