“He set his snares for game, but when he got up at night to look at them he found everything on fire.  His sister told him he had caught the sun unawares, and when the boy, Chakabech, went to see, so it was.  But he dared not go near enough to let him out.  But by chance he found a little mouse, and blew upon her until she grew so big” (again the mastodon) “that she could set the sun free, and he went on his way.  But while he was held in the snare, day failed down here on earth.”

It was the age of darkness[2]

The Dog-Rib Indians, far in the northwest of America, near the Esquimaux, have a similar story:  Chakabech becomes Chapewee.  He too climbs a tree, but it is in pursuit

[1.  Tylor’s “Early History of Mankind,” p. 848.

2.  Le Jeune (1637), in “Rélations des Jesuits dans la Nouvelle France,” vol. i, p. 54.]

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of a squirrel, until he reaches heaven.  He set a snare made of his sister’s hair and caught the sun. “The sky was instantly darkened.  Chapewee’s family said to him, ’You must have done something wrong when you were aloft, for we no longer enjoy the light of day.’  ’I have,’ replied he, ‘but it was unintentionally.’  Chapewee sent a number of animals to cut the snare, but the intense heat reduced them all to ashes.”  At last the ground-mole working in the earth cut the snare but lost its sight, “and its nose and teeth have ever since been brown as if burnt."[1]

The natives of Siberia represented the mastodon as a great mole burrowing in the earth and casting up ridges of earth—­the sight of the sun killed him.

These sun-catching legends date back to a time when the races of the earth had not yet separated.  Hence we find the same story, in almost the same words, in Polynesia and America.

Maui is the Polynesian god of the ancient days.  He concluded, as did Ta-wats, that the days were too short.  He wanted the sun to slow-up, but it would not.  So he proceeded to catch it in a noose like the Ojibway boy and the Wyandot youth.  The manufacture of the noose, we are told, led to the discovery of the art of rope-making.  He took his brothers with him; he armed himself, like Samson, with a jaw-bone, but instead of the jaw-bone of an ass, he, with much better taste, selected the jawbone of his mistress.  She may have been a lady of fine conversational powers.  They traveled far, like Ta-wats, even to the very edge of the place where the sun rises.  There he set his noose.  The sun came and put his head and fore-paws into it; then the brothers pulled the ropes

[1.  Richardson’s “Narrative of Franklin’s Second Expedition,” p. 291.]

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tight and Maui gave him a great whipping with the jawbone; he screamed and roared; they held him there for a long time, (the Age of Darkness,) and at last they let him go; and weak from his wounds, (obscured by clouds,) he crawls slowly along his path.  Here the jaw of the wolf Fenris, which reached from earth to heaven, in the Scandinavian legends, becomes a veritable jaw-bone which beats and ruins the sun.