Folktale

In the Native American folktale, the Attack of the Mammoth: A Native American Legend from the Kaska First Nation of British Columbia. A man and his family are always on the move to different lakes and rivers to hunt for beaver, one night while the woman was out gathering all the beavers with her baby, on the way back she heard noises so she turned around and there was a mammoth, so she dropped all of the beaver meat and ran back to camp. When she told her husband of this incidant he did not believe her and told her that she was dreaming and that all the mammoths have died off. Once they finished there meal the husband laughed at his wife because she still had her moccasins on. The husband went to sleep but the wife stayed up all night waiting because she knew the mammoth was going to attack. She suddenly heard something so she tried to wake her husband he was not pleased when he got waken up in the middle of the night and he went right back to sleep, but the wife got up and ran away and with her own eyes she saw her husband get eaten by the mammoth. She ran as fast as she could to the nearest tribe and told them of the mammoth so they dug holes around there village and so that the mammoth would fall into the water where the ice was weak. The mammoth came to the village and fell through the ice but instead of drowning it just kept comeing through the ice until it got to the village. The whole tribe started to panic and run away but one boy who told his grandmother to get his magic bow and arrow, when he got them he fought the mammoth and in the end destroyed it. Because he killed the beast he became the villages cheif and got two beautiful girls to become his wifes.

In this folktale the wife represents the maiden in distress because she is traveling and looking for someone to save her and her baby from the horrifying mammoth. The hero is the boy in the village who killed the mammoth and saved the whole village. The crone would be the husband because he is not listening to the wife and going with her when she left.

As there culture they were always looking for people who could protect them with magic powers. If someone did protect them they would become the cheif of the tribe. This happened in the story when the boy got his magic bow and arrows and protected the village from the mammoth, once he killed it he became the cheif of the tribe.