Jade

The two ravens sat on an outcropping of sparkling ice glazed jade looking down on the People as they often did.  In those days the People were one nation and lived by the sea.  They hunted seal, whale and walrus as they had since the first day the ravens had made them.

This year had been very cold and the open water was many, many, days from the winter camps even though it was nearly the Sun with No Night.  The people were quite hungry their stocks of whale meat and dried fish were gone and no shiifish took the un-baited barren hooks dropped in the holes cut in the sea ice.  Not a berry could be found in any cache.  No seal oil was left for the lamps.  Grandmothers were disappearing and naked babies were fed one last meal of cold hard snow.  The ravens were saddened by their creations plight.

“What can we do for the People?  They have no food and the seals are having their pups so far from their camps.  Only the great white bear has a full belly.”

“Ah, the brown bear, too, has a full belly.  The caribou are plentiful and he eats well.”

“It’s too bad the People do not know of the land and its creatures.”

The ravens thought for a long time.  “Yes that is the answer!  We shall make the people two, some will live off the sea like the white bear and some off the land like the brown bear and when the times are bad for the one the other will offer food from their cache and no one will get very hungry and grandmothers won’t disappear.”

“That is a wonderful idea, they will be cousins, close relations but from different homes.”

And so they put a dream in half the young men and half the young women living in their seaside camps.  The dream was of the creatures of the land and how to hunt them and fashion useful things from their bodies.  These young people married and traveled up the Noatak and Kobuk and Porcupine and all the rivers, to places far from the sea where they set camps by the great herds of caribou, moose and muskoxen.  In not too many years they had many fat children and fine villages.  They would travel to the sea sometimes to their grandparent’s camps and trade caribou, wolf, bear and horns with their cousins the Sea People for seal, whale and ivory.

All had full bellies and prospered and listened to magical stories told by very old grandmothers in the smoky yellow light of the seal oil lamps.