In a forest, people drained a lake teeming with beavers, killing all but one large beaver that escaped. Later, they heard a woman singing near the drained lake, lamenting the destruction. She warned of their fate: all the beaver hunters drowned on their journey back, with some bodies never recovered, believed to have been taken by the large beaver in vengeance.
Source:
Tlingit Myths and Texts
by John R. Swanton
[Smithsonian Institution]
Bureau of American Ethnology
Bulletin 39
Washington, 1909
► Themes of the story
Divine Punishment: The villagers face retribution for their actions against nature, suggesting a higher power’s involvement in enforcing moral consequences.
Conflict with Nature: The humans’ exploitation of the beavers leads to a fatal confrontation, highlighting the perils of disrupting natural harmony.
Supernatural Beings: The large beaver exhibits extraordinary abilities, such as causing the hunters’ deaths, indicating its supernatural nature.
► From the same Region or People
Learn more about the Tlingit people
Myth recorded in English at Wrangell, Alaska, in January-April 1904
At a certain place far back in the forest was a large lake in which were many beaver houses. One time some people found this lake and dug a trench out of it in order to drain it. Then they broke up the beavers’ houses so that the beavers began to swim down through the trench.
As they floated along the people killed them, all except one very large beaver, which they knew must have been there on account of its fresh tracks. They looked into all of the beaver houses they had broken up, but could not find it. It must have gotten out at the very start and made its escape into the woods.
Quite a while after this had been done, the people who had killed the beavers walked up to the place where the lake had been.
► Continue reading…
When they got close to the place where they had let it out they heard a woman singing in a beautiful voice: “Why didn’t you ask one another to stop, my brothers? You begged yourselves to go off, my brothers.” She sang thus because all of those who had destroyed the beavers were to die. She was sitting on a part of the broken dam. So, on the way back to their village, all of these people were drowned and only a few bodies were recovered. Those whose bodies were not found had been captured by the big beaver.
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Dreamtime Whispers 