Raven primped at his feathers while Eagle blew smoke.
“Very nicely done, Raven,” said Eagle.
“Yes, thank you,” replied Raven. “And thank you for your Ghost of Christmas Past routine. Very thought provoking.”
“One problem, though,” Eagle said. “Look.”
Raven looked and what did he see? People fighting each other over the Box of Knowledge. Angry, shouting, pummeling, vicious fighting. Over Knowledge.
“I’ve had it with these people!” Raven said. “Thunderbird! Thunderbird!”
“Why are you calling Thunderbird?” asked Eagle.
“It’s time for another Flood,” Raven replied. “It’s time to start over.”
“Perhaps that is not such a good idea,” said Eagle.
Raven reflected on the last Flood, brought on not by Thunderbird, but by his uncle, who had power over the tides.
“My uncle was the moon, you know,” Raven told Eagle. “Or so I was told. He kept his wife in a box.”
“That seems somehow…wrong,” said Eagle.
“It was a very trying time back then,” continued Raven. “My uncle commanded that my mother’s children be put to death, for he feared they would betray him to his wife, the one in the box—he was probably right —and so his men murdered my mother’s children. It was then that Killer Whale came to my mother—“
“I’ve heard it another way,” said Eagle. “I heard it was Heron who came to your mother.”
“It was Killer Whale with a hole in his dorsal fin,” corrected Raven.
“Stories can change over time,” Eagle said with a shrug.
“Killer Whale came to my mother and told her to heat and swallow a stone she found at low tide. She did, and I was born.”
“I’m not sure it works that way,” mused Eagle.
“Is Killer Whale my father?” Raven asked Eagle. “Or is my father Heron? Either way, I was born of stone. That’s the important part. My mother hid me away until I was big, and then my uncle sent for me. I went to him and he asked me to carve his canoe, which I did. But it was a murder canoe. It fell around me and tried to eat me! So I broke it in two and threw the pieces at my uncle’s feet. He was mad! He then commanded me to chop down a tree. It was a flint tree, and shards of stone flew off when I chopped it. It would have killed me had I not been half-stone on my mother’s side!”
“I believe it was an Obsidian tree,” said Eagle. “And the shards were of glass...”
“Nevertheless, my uncle next ordered me to kill a great octopus, very large and devilish,” said Raven. “He hoped the octopus would eat me! But I shrank that octopus and brought it to my uncle’s house and made it big again, so it filled the entire house!”
“Ha, ha!” Cheered Eagle. “Your uncle was foiled again!”
“I shrunk that octopus small again and sent him out to sea. My uncle left, and he was mad. That’s when he commanded the tide to rise higher than it has ever risen. That’s when he made a flood to wash away the world.”
“I remember that part,” said Eagle.
“I flew up to the top of the sky until my beak stuck in the blue and I waited there many days until the tide retreated, and then everything was fine and my uncle was gone.”
“That’s not how I recall it,” said Eagle.
Raven was indignant. “Who are you to recall my stories?”
“People recall things and they tell the stories and those stories change with the recollection,” explained Eagle. “Our stories are fungible by definition.”
“I don’t like the idea,” said Raven. “What is this other ‘recollection’ you have heard?”
“Ah,” grinned Eagle, “simply that during the Great Flood, which we both agree was a cataclysmic event, you, ever resourceful, turned into a stone!”
“A stone!” Raven squawked. “Gak! Like the Stone Man from the plaza?”
“A stone!” Eagle confirmed. “A little round, flat stone. Because you are half stone! You’ve told me that yourself. You turned into a stone and settled to the bottom of the sea to wait out the Flood, and when the waters had finally retreated and the land had reappeared, you became yourself again and found your mother, floating in the duck skin you had given her!”
Raven considered the viability of this new recollection. It was not a bad idea, turning into a stone to wait out a Flood. And anyway, where is the top of the sky? He had flown quite high at times and never reached the top. How high would he have had to go to reach the top? And anyway, weren’t both possibilities possible in the Multi-verse?
“I made my first brother out of stone,” Raven mused. “He wasn’t a very good brother; he literally sat around all the time. It wasn’t until I made a brother out of leaves—”
“Raven,” interrupted Eagle. “Don’t become enamored with your own storytelling.”
“The water had washed nearly everyone away,” Raven remembered. “I saved my mother by wrapping her in a duck skin. Many people wrapped themselves in duck skins so they could float. Others found their canoes. All of them asked if this would be their last moment in life. The torrents carried nearly all of them away, except those who fled to the mountains and those with the duck skins and those in their canoes.”
“Excellent, Raven,” said Eagle. “Now put it to song.”
Raven sang.
Reach out so that we may be together. We step into the canoe to begin our journey. We dip our paddles into the water so that we may move forward in unity and build the world again.
