Atondido Stories
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, lead-
ing 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.
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