later, when the chief and chieftainess were out, the two great slaves called Mouth at Each End came in, carrying a large cut of whale meat. They threw the whale fat into the fire and ate it. The shining youth came up to them and asked, “What makes you so hungry?” The great slaves replied, “We are hungry because we have eaten scabs from our shinbones.” “Do you like what you eat?” asked the shining youth. “Oh yes, my dear,” said the slave man.
“Then I will taste the scabs you speak about,” replied the prince. “No, my dear! Do not wish to be as we are!” cried the slave woman. “I will just taste it and spit it out again,” said the prince. The slave man cut a bit of whale meat and put a small scab in it. The slave woman scolded him, “O bad man! What are you doing to the poor prince?”
The shining prince took the piece of meat with the scab in it, tasted it, and spat it out again. Then he went back to bed.
When the chief and his wife returned, the prince said to his mother, “Mother, I am very hungry.” “Oh dear, is it true, is it true?” She ordered the slaves to feed rich food to her beloved son. The youth ate it all. As soon as he finished, he became ravenous again. The slaves gave him more and more to eat, and he ate everything. He ate for days. Soon all the provisions in his father’s house were gone. The prince then went from house to house in the village and devoured all the stores of food, for he had tasted the scabs of Mouth at Each End.
Soon the entire tribe’s stores of food were almost exhausted. The great chief felt sad and ashamed on account of his son. He assembled the tribe and spoke: “I will send my child away before he eats all our food.” The tribe agreed with this decision; the chief summoned his son and, sitting him in the rear of the house, said to him: “My dear son, I shall send you over the ocean to the mainland.” He gave his son a small round stone, a raven blanket, and a dried sea-lion bladder filled with all kinds of berries. “When you put on this raven blanket you will become Raven, and fly,” the chief told him. “When you feel weary flying, drop this round stone on the sea, and you shall find rest. When you reach the mainland, scatter the various kinds of fruit over the land; and scatter the salmon roe in all the rivers and brooks, and also the trout roe, so that you may not lack food as long as you live in the world.” The son put on the raven blanket and flew toward the east.
Such is the story of the origin of Raven and his hunger. In the parts of the cycle that follow, Raven creates the world as we know it: he places the fish in the rivers and scatters the fruit over the land. When he arrives in this world he finds it has no light but, remembering that there was light in the heaven from which he came, he returns and steals it so that this world will not be in darkness.
To reflect on the story of Raven’s hunger, note first that the shining prince in this tale is not exactly the chief’s son (the corpse, after all, remains); he is some sort of emissary from heaven, come in the youth’s stead as an antidote to grief. The island on which the boy’s parents live lies between heaven and earth; Raven travels from heaven to the world of the animal tribe, and then he travels from that world to this one, where appetite has no end and where the berries and fish have no end. In short, as in many trickster tales, the Tsimshian Raven is a go-between, a mediator. There are three spheres of being in the story, and Raven moves among them.
From the point of view of Raven’s final home—this world of hunger and food—the father who loves his son is bound to fail in his attempt to keep the boy from all harm. In this world, people die; animals die. To desire the contrary is to desire a changeless perfection, a heaven, an ideal. Seeing that, perhaps we can now link three enigmas in the story: Why does the father have his son’s intestines burnt? Why are the slaves called Mouth at Each End? What are those shin scabs?
To begin with, eating and death are part of the world of change (just as their suppression would be part of changeless perfection), so let us say that the intestines are a sign of our mutable world, and that their name is Mouth at Both Ends. The slaves are therefore the alimentary canal, that servant of the body who brings all kinds of food into our home every day. The story is built around the question of whether or not the intestines will own the boy. The father hopes they won’t, and so he has his attendants remove and burn them when the boy dies, a nice image for getting rid of appetite. If he could live, a boy without intestines might be freed from hunger, freed from attachments, freed from sickness and death. In any event, the parents’ grief and sacrifice summon up a weird “ideal” being who shines like fire and does not eat, as if he had been gutted.
The shin scabs seem the most mysterious image here. In the far north, Raven is sometimes called “the trickster with the scaly legs”; perhaps to native eyes when a raven rubs its beak against its legs it appears to be self-eating, the Hungry One tasting its own scabs. To read the image more figuratively, let’s first remember how scabs come to be, and what their function is. Scabs bespeak some kind of rough contact with the world. They follow wounds, and are the healing of wounds. As we heal, we slough them off; as such, they are a kind of bodily excrement. They are also a kind of fruiting, flesh producing flesh out of itself, a strange fruit to be sure, but one that is actually eaten in this case.
If we begin with the idea of “rough contact,” perhaps the shin scabs in the story, like calluses on the hands, represent work, the labor by which humankind must get its keep (these are food-getting slaves, after all, whose shins are scabbed). It is a widespread motif in this mythology that once upon a time we humans did not have to work for our food (every morning there was a bowl of hot acorn mush outside the lodge), but then trickster came along, did something foolish, and now we must labor. So perhaps “to eat shin scabs” is to enter the world of scarcity and work.
Because scabs are linked with wounds, they may also indicate that Raven is born of woundedness. But what wound is there in this tale? Remember that the father here hopes to keep his son from all harm, and that his hopes are twice defeated, once when the boy dies and once again when the scabs turn his spirit into a shamefully hungry creature. I suspect the second defeat arises from the father’s response to the first. He had his people cut out the boy’s intestines, and then the slaves—who are in some way like intestines—appear, wounded and scabbing. Raven is not the father’s hoped-for ideal youth who has escaped this world; he is, rather, a restless, hungry beast who is in this world precisely because his father’s idealism wounded him, and he has tasted the fruit of that wound.
Finally, if scabs are a kind of excrement, perhaps the story means that Raven comes to life where the body sheds its wastes. (Ravens, in fact, will eat excrement, and the mythology is full of scatological episodes.) But “excrement” may be too precise a word here, for in this case what the body sheds becomes food. Perhaps Raven comes to life where waste turns into fruit, or better, where one’s own waste becomes one’s food (it is their own scabs that the slaves eat). There is a circularity to eating here which suggests that, at some level, eating is self-eating, or that all who eat in this world must eventually themselves be eaten. In this world, everything that feeds will someday be food for other mouths; that is the law of appetite, or—as we’d now say—of ecological interdependence. If I’m right to imagine that the removed intestines reappear as the slaves, then in this story, at the “beginning of things,” we find Raven tasting the fruit of his own wounded guts and by that self-eating setting in motion this world of endless hunger.
Here it should be noted that there is some natural history woven into this story. When hunters kill an animal in the woods they typically gut it on the spot, then carry the carcass home; later, ravens will come to eat the guts (and coyotes and wolves will follow, drawn by the ravens). Raven is said to have told the Athabascan Indians that they would be able to catch deer if they would leave the guts for him to feed on each time the game is killed; elsewhere, the entrails of the kill are left as a gift to Coyote. Each case presents an image of appetite eating the organs of appetite.
One thing draws together these various readings: in each, Raven comes down to this world. “Raven Becomes Voracious” is a
