And so it happened when this great fish had approached with consummate stealth and was about to seize its prey, grandfather grasped the top of a high mountain and tipped the earth over so that all the water ran off. Then it was the curvature of the fish’s spine was his destruction; for the waters being removed, so great was the weight of his body and so rigid his spine he broke entirely in two and immediately succumbed.
My grandfather at once took from him his skin which he neatly dressed and dried in the sun and ever afterward used as a horn to call his hosts together from the four quarters of the sky; which he immediately did and peopled the earth which was now dry and green and exceedingly fair to behold.
In those old days when the world was peopled with giants there became classes and clans, or tribes, as they were then known, each of which was composed of the descendants of one man, and they were all such a merry lot life was considered a most excellent thing indeed.
One day my grandfather, to whom I have alluded in my salutation, went up to the North Pole. There he learned the cause of the change of seasons, and finding it exceedingly cold conceived a joke he would play upon his tribe. Thereupon he filled his horn full of the northern air and carried it back.
Now it happened the day on which he returned was bath day and the whole tribe was bathing in the lake. When he was within such distance he could put the mouth of the horn to the edge of the lake he did so and blew softly upon it.
The lake was immediately covered by a coat of ice upon which the people at once stood, for the water was becoming so cold they could not stay in it. He continued to blow on the horn and the people got so cold they began to shrivel up, and had he not at last blown all the cold out of this horn they would have shrunken into mere nothing. As it was they were so small he had to look several times to discover where they were, and he put the whole tribe in the pocket of his overcoat and carried them to his tent. He tried hard to warm them up and bring them back to their normal size, but it was impossible.
Thus it came about that this tribe became the forefathers of what are now called Pigmies and Dwarfs, and their mixture with the giants produced the present stature of the people of the earth.