A young man driven from home crosses the breaking sea ice floe by floe, just as his father foretold, eats of birds that turn to rich sheep's meat upon the spit, hears the reindeer speak in the manner of men, and wins a wife who throws herself down and runs home as a she-wolf to fetch fire. A foundling born of a reindeer doe opens his mouth and swallows the herd whole, until his brother flees him in the night and finds a wife who beats the bushes with a pan-shovel for whipping her husband. And a Hare who visits the Man-Slayer out of curiosity talks his way off the cooking-line and out of the hatchet's reach, and hides under an Eagle-Woman's dish while his pursuer is carried up to the sky and dropped head-first into the earth.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters:
00:05 — Sea-Jumper
13:18 — Reindeer-Born
17:20 — Hare Story
From Chukchee Mythology (1910) by Waldemar Bogoras — Part I of The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, Vol. VIII (Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History). Public domain. These three tales open the book's Tales of Russianized Natives. Sea-Jumper was told by Theodosia, a Russianized Yukaghir woman, in the village of Two Brooks on the Large Anui, 1905; Reindeer-Born was told by Mary Alin, a Russianized Chuvantzy woman, at Markova on the Anadyr River, December 1905; and Hare Story was written down by the cossack Innocent Bereskin from the words of Mary Chahin, a Russianized Yukaghir woman, at Pokhotsk on the Lower Kolyma, 1895. Fresh English rendering by KacheliTV; Sea-Jumper is heard with its opening beating told in a single clause, Reindeer-Born with its hostess's former food left untold — her giving it up stands as the condition of her marriage — and the tale left unfinished as its teller left it, and Hare Story with the Hare's bag-of-meat trick left untold, per the shelf's screening ledger. Northern Tales gathers the Chukchi, Siberian Eskimo, Koryak, Yukaghir and Even tales from Bogoras's Jesup North Pacific Expedition volumes, in the books' own order.
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