The Indian Fairy Book | Page 5

he; "I shall revenge myself. Oh,
sun! I will have you for a plaything yet."
On coming home he gave an account of his misfortune to his sister, and
bitterly bewailed the spoiling of his new coat. He would not eat--not so
much as a single berry. He lay down as one that fasts; nor did he move
nor change his manner of lying for ten full days, though his sister
strove to prevail on him to rise. At the end of ten days he turned over,

and then he lay full ten days on the other side.
When he got up he was very pale, but very resolute too. He bade his
sister make a snare, for, he informed her, that he meant to catch the sun.
She said she had nothing; but after awhile she brought forward a deer's
sinew which the father had left, and which she soon made into a string
suitable for a noose. The moment she showed it to him he was quite
wroth, and told her that would not do, and directed her to find
something else. She said she had nothing--nothing at all. At last she
thought of the bird-skin that was left over when the coat was made; and
this she wrought into a string. With this the little boy was more vexed
than before. "The sun has had enough of my bird-skins," he said; "find
something else." She went out of the lodge saying to herself, "Was
there ever so obstinate a boy?" She did not dare to answer this time that
she had nothing. Luckily she thought of her own beautiful hair, and
pulling some of it from among her locks, she quickly braided it into a
cord, and, returning, she handed it to her brother. The moment his eye
fell upon this jet black braid he was delighted. "This will do," he said;
and he immediately began to run it back and forth through his hands as
swiftly as he could; and as he drew it forth, he tried its strength. He said
again, "this will do;" and winding it in a glossy coil about his shoulders,
he set out a little after midnight. His object was to catch the sun before
he rose. He fixed his snare firmly on a spot just where the sun must
strike the land as it rose above the earth; and sure enough, he caught the
sun, so that it was held fast in the cord and did not rise.
The animals who ruled the earth were immediately put into great
commotion. They had no light; and they ran to and fro, calling out to
each other, and inquiring what had happened. They summoned a
council to debate upon the matter, and an old dormouse, suspecting
where the trouble lay, proposed that some one should be appointed to
go and cut the cord. This was a bold thing to undertake, as the rays of
the sun could not fail to burn whoever should venture so near to them.
At last the venerable dormouse himself undertook it, for the very good
reason that no one else would. At this time the dormouse was the
largest animal in the world. When he stood up he looked like a

mountain. It made haste to the place where the sun lay ensnared, and as
it came nearer and nearer, its back began to smoke and burn with the
heat, and the whole top of his huge bulk was turned in a very short time
to enormous heaps of ashes. It succeeded, however, in cutting the cord
with its teeth and freeing the sun, which rolled up again, as round and
beautiful as ever, into the wide blue sky. But the dormouse--or blind
woman as it is called--was shrunk away to a very small size; and that is
the reason why it is now one of the tiniest creatures upon the earth.
The little boy returned home when he discovered that the sun had
escaped his snare, and devoted himself entirely to hunting. "If the
beautiful hair of my sister would not hold the sun fast, nothing in the
world could," he said. "He was not born, a little fellow like himself, to
look after the sun. It required one greater and wiser than he was to
regulate that." And he went out and shot ten more snow-birds; for in
this business he was very expert; and he had a new bird-skin coat made,
which was prettier than the one he had worn before.

III.
STRONG DESIRE, AND THE RED SORCERER.
There was a man called Odshedoph, or the Child of Strong Desires,
who had a wife and one son. He had withdrawn his family from the
village, where they had spent the winter, to the neighborhood of