40. Rabbit Gets Man-eater Over to the Other Side of the Ocean

40. RABBIT GETS MAN-EATER OVER TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OCEAN (65)

Rabbit and Man-eater met and they got to bragging about the nature of their excrement. In order to prove their contentions they sat down side by side, closed their eyes, and defecated. Before Man-eater opened his eyes, however, Rabbit shifted the excrement, and when they got up there was a great pile of bones under him. "That is my kind of excrement," he said. When Man-eater got up he found his looked very different and exclaimed, "That is not my kind at all. There is something wrong."

Afterwards they went down together to a creek called Sprinkling. (hot-ashes) Creek (Tofogaga håtci). They camped there for the night, making a good bed of coals before they went to sleep. While Man-eater slept Rabbit got up, sprinkled some coals where he had been lying and threw a lot over Man-eater. Then he began to brush ashes off of himself so that Man-eater found him doing it when he got up badly burned.

However, Man-eater mistrusted him and gave chase to him. By and by they came to a creek which Rabbit jumped across. Then Rabbit kept jumping back and forth across it, pursued by Man-eater, and as he did so the creek got wider and wider, until finally Rabbit was left on one side and Man-eater on the other.

This story is used as a medicine song in cases of cholera morbus.