The lines the citing connections rest on, digitized from the public-domain edition named under each passage. Wording is the edition's own.
The fire-theft story ends, in both traditions, with fire deliberately deposited INSIDE named species of wood (and stone), where it still waits · the myth is a filing system: it records which materials hold latent fire, and the fire-drill or strike-a-light is the act of withdrawing the deposit. Two unconnected coastlines of the Pacific preserve the same closing formula: fire was not given to people, it was hidden where people could always find it.
After the theft, Raven 'took some red cedar, and some white stones called neq!... and he put fire into them so that it could be found ever afterward all over the world.'
set against Grey, Polynesian Mythology, pp.…
The fire raid permanently brands the body of the animal who dared it: black feathers, red eyes, a burned-short bill. Animal anatomy is read as scar tissue from the one theft. The sharpest edge: the same bird · Raven · is the scorched FAILURE in the Cherokee telling and the mastermind THIEF in the Tlingit telling, as if one dossier were split between two files, the failure kept in one tradition and the success in the other.
The chicken hawk seizes the fire and holds on as ordered, 'but by the time it got the fire to Raven its bill was burned off. That is why its bill is short.'
set against Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee,…
The reading room shelves citations and short passages digitized from public-domain editions. Full texts enter through the digitization queue.