Mr. Raven flew high over his family while they skirted the waves. He thought, "The rough sea makes me sick so I think I ought to return to the land." He managed to yell loud enough to be heard by his family, "Good-bye Lady Bird and my sons and daughters." In answer to their father, the Raven, they flapped their wings.

As soon as he left, he cried, and said, "To think that I'll spend the winter alone. Where will I live and with whom?" He could not wipe his tears until he landed, so he decided to try to float on the surface of the sea. When he did, he began to sink, and the waves slapped him around every which way. "I wish a miracle would happen to me." And, sure enough, there appeared a great big door before him which said, "Come in, Mr. Raven, and dry yourself in my living room."

He felt relieved and hopped in. The door popped shut right behind him. "Oh! I am thankful for this lift."

The invisible owner who was leading Mr. Raven through the hallway said, "Sit here and rest, but please don't touch my lamp at the ceiling. If you do, you and I will be in the darkness."

Raven promised he would not touch the lamp. He sat for a long while watching the blinking lamp. Then he asked himself, "Where am I, and why is this room so terribly dark?"

After a while, his curiosity got the best of him. He flew up to the lamp and poked at it several times with his bird knife which he had kept under his wing inside its case. All of a sudden, the light went out. When Raven went down, he bumped the floor very hard. In the darkness poor Raven began to rock back and forth from one side of the room to the other. And he smelled a putrid odor around him and his feet felt

sticky. His wings were matted together. He could not breathe; he knew he was suffocating. "What shall I do?" he thought. He began to cry and great teardrops washed his sticky face. Since he was very thirsty, he gulped these droplets and that made him feel a little cooler. When the house stopped rocking, he decided to cut an outlet through the wall with his knife. He worked very hard to cut a square opening in

what he thought was a wooden wall, and every few minutes he would run his fingers through the slit he had made. He cut and cut and pushed and pushed and pushed. As he pushed harder, the square began to move, and his repeated efforts made him feel stronger. When he pushed on the square piece for perhaps the hundredth time, it popped outward and he heard water splash as it landed outside. Light came streaming in and blinded him, so he leaned against this window. He did not know how long he stood there. Then he said, "Thank goodness I'm breathing fresh air into my lungs."

He felt his chest and it was like an inflated balloon. Now Raven was able to peck very carefully through the porthole he had made. to his surprise, he saw a long beachline with its skirt spread out as if to receive the wavelets for herself from the sea.

Raven was so happy and wanted to smile, but he couldn't because his feathers had matted together and he couldn't move his facial skin. All he could do was to quork and quork until other land birds and sea birds began to fly around this house he was in. He finally managed to jump out through the hole he had cut and, when he did he plunged right into the shallow water of the beach. As he was bathing there, the wavelets turned red. Then he hopped farther up onto the dry sand and suddenly turned around. Do you know what he saw? A large animal! He did not know what he had done until that very minute. He had killed a big baleen whale. He said to himself, "I'm a good hunter, Lady Bird."

Emily Ivanoff Brown