closed his eyes and hopped clumsily about while Marmot sang,
"Oh, Raven, Raven, Raven, what a graceful dancer! Oh, Raven, Raven,
Raven, what a fool you are!" And with a quick run, Marmot darted
between Raven's legs and was safe in his hole.

There he turned, putting out the tip of his nose and laughing
mockingly as he said, "_Chi-kik-kik, chi-kik-kik, chi-kik-kik_! You
are the greatest fool I ever met. What a ridiculous figure you made
while dancing; I could scarcely sing for laughing. Look at me, and see
how fat I am. Don't you wish you could eat me?"

And he tormented Raven till the latter flew away in a rage.

XXIX

ORIGIN OF THE WINDS

In a village on the lower Yukon lived a man and his wife who had no
children. One day the woman said to her husband, "Far out on the
tundra there grows a solitary tree. Go to that and bring back a piece
of the trunk, and make a doll from it. Then it will seem that we have
a child."

The man went out of the house and saw a long track of bright light
like that made by the moon shining on snow, leading off across the
tundra in the direction he had been told to take. It was the Milky
Way. Along this path he traveled far away until he saw before him a
beautiful object shining in the bright light. Going up to it, he found
it was the tree of which he came in search. The tree was small, so he
took his hunting-knife, cut off a part of the trunk, and carried the
fragment home.

He sat down in the house and carved out from the wood an image of a
small boy, and his wife made two suits of clothing for it and dressed
it in one of them, "saving the other to put on when he had soiled the
first," she said.

"Now, Father, make your little boy a set of toy dishes," she said.

"I see no use in all this trouble. We will be no better off than we
were in the first place," said the man.

"Why, yes, we are already better off," said the wife. "Before we had
the doll we had nothing to talk about except ourselves. Now we have
the doll to talk about and to amuse us."

To please her the husband made the toy dishes, and she placed the doll
in the seat of honor on the bench opposite the door, with the dishes
full of food and water before it.

When the couple had gone to bed that night the room was very dark and
they heard several low, whistling sounds.

"Do you hear that? It is the doll," said the woman, shaking her
husband till he awakened.

They got up at once and, making a light, saw th