Predict

Will Kitselemukong help the animals and people?

So Kitselemukong began to hurl down lightning from the top of the highest mountain. Each time a bolt of lightning struck, one of the Yakwawiak was killed. Finally, only the largest of the terrible monsters remained. He was so large that the other monsters seemed small in comparison. It seemed that nothing could defeat him. Each time a lightning bolt was hurled at him, he knocked it away with his tusks. But this one Yakwawi had been wounded many times, and he was growing weaker. At last he turned and began to run. He ran toward the cold north land, where no trees grow and there is always ice and snow. Some tried to follow him, but Two Hawks Flying called them back.

“No,” he said. “That one is the last of his kind. He will no longer bother us.”

Some say that the Yakwawi is still hiding there to this day. You may hear his awful cry in the howl of the north wind. Sometimes, it is said, a lone hunter may chance upon the Yakwawi in that far northern land. If that hunter has not been a good man, if he has killed animals needlessly and not shared with others, such a hunter never returns to his people.

When we dig into the earth in the places where the battle raged long ago, we find the bones and the giant tusks of the Yakwawiak. Nothing else remains of them in the lands of the Lenape, the human beings.

But Kitselemukong left one other sign on the earth of that great battle. In the marshlands created by that long ago fight, there where the blood soaked into the earth, Kitselemukong made a new berry grow. Its skin is as red as the blood that was shed. It is the cranberry. When the people see it, they remember the fate of the Yakwawiak, those great creatures who had no respect for the rest of the creation.