Tirawa (Pawnee, Great Plains) Great Spirit and Creator god Tirawa holds a council and assigns tasks to the other gods. The sun god Shakaru is ordered to give light and warmth; the moon goddess Pah gives sleep and rest in the night; and the stars-Bright, Evening, Great, and Morning-are told to hold up the sky. The first humans are born when the sun and moon marry and have a boy called Closed Man. When the Evening Star and Morning Star finally couple, they produce a girl-known as "Daughter of Evening and Morning Star." The Pawnee believed that they were decended from these first children of the heavens.

But Tirawa gets angry and destroys his creation with a fire and then a great flood. The only survivors are an old man who carries a pipe, fire, and a drum; and his wife, who carries maize and pumpkin seeds. These two, who have been protected in a cave, re-create the human race.

White Buffalo Woman (Sioux, Northern Plains) A beautiful, long-haired figure in a white buckskin dress, White Buffalo (Calf) Woman is one of the most significant deities of the Plains tribes. Once, when the people are starving, two scouts go and search for food. They see a blur in the distance and, as it approaches, one of the scouts realizes it is the sacred White Buffalo Woman. The woman, who can read the bad thoughts of one of the young men, invites him to embrace her. But as he reaches toward her, a white cloud appears and lightning strikes the lusty man, who is killed instantly. His body is turned into a skeleton and then devoured by worms.

The second scout returns to the village to set up a great teepee for her. Once this is done, White Buffalo Woman instructs the tribes in all the sacred ceremonies. She explains how to use the pipe and teaches them seven sacred rites, including the sweat lodge, vision quest, the "ghost-keeping ceremony," in which the soul of the dead is purified, the sun dance, the hunka ceremony (designed to establish binding relationships among fellow human beings), girls' puberty rites, and the "throwing of the ball," a ceremony celebrating knowledge, in which a buffalo-hide ball is tossed to people standing in the four compass directions.

As she talks to the chiefs, White Buffalo Woman is a woman. But when she leaves, the people see her roll in the dust four times, bow to each corner of the universe, and then become a white buffalo before vanishing, perhaps to return again one day.

To the Plains people, no animal was more sacred than the buffalo, which completely sustained their way of life.

Which goddess gets her own "planet"?

If the Roman goddess Venus represents everything that is beautiful and good, the Inuit goddess Sedna may be her complete opposite. Queen of the underworld, Sedna gets mixed up in acts of trickery, kidnapping, murder, dismemberment, cannibalism, and revenge. The only thing that she shares with Venus is the fact that each has a heavenly body named in her honor.

While Venus was first observed by the earliest "astronomers" in prehistoric times, the Inuit goddess Sedna joined the celestial charts when the discovery of a small object orbiting the sun was announced in March 2004. Too small to qualify as a planet in the view of most astronomers, Sedna is essentially a large chunk of rock caught in a regular orbit of the sun and now thought to be the most distant object from the sun. The scientists who found this piece of the flotsam and jetsam in a very distant reach of space called the Kuiper Belt decided to name it after the Inuit sea goddess who plays a role in many myths.

In one myth, an Arctic seabird known as a fulmar, and noted for its foul (no pun intended) smell, sees Sedna and falls in love with her. Assuming human form, the bird makes himself a parka, woos Sedna, and invites her home. When they arrive, Sedna realizes that she has been tricked by the birdman and desperately calls for her father, Anguta, to help her. But he doesn't hear her cries, and she has to spend months in this awful place. When Anguta eventually finds Sedna, he kills the mischievous bird. Discovering the murder, the other birds surround the father's kayak, flap their wings in what seems like a Hitchcockian scene from The Birds, and create a storm that tosses the kayak in the waves.

Afraid the boat will capsize, Sedna's father decides to look out for number one-himself! To lighten the boat's load, he tosses his daughter into the sea. When she clings to the boat, Anguta takes out his knife and hacks off her fingers, one by one. In one version of the tale, each of Sedna's fingers turns into a sea animal.

Angry at her father, Sedna seeks revenge. She calls on a team of dogs to attack him and gnaw on his hands and feet. He curses and screams until the earth opens up and they all tumble into the underworld. That is where Sedna lives and reigns as queen, blessing hunters with animals and creating terrible storms. The only thing she cannot do is comb her hair, since she has no fingers.

In another myth, Sedna begins life as a beautiful young woman but later becomes a one-eyed giantess who populates the sea with ocean life while Anguta, her father, makes the earth, sea, and heavens. But Sedna's appearance is so hideous that only medicine men can bear to look at her. And some of her personal habits are pretty awful, too. On one occasion, which mirrors a scene from Night of the Living Dead, she feels the urge to eat some human flesh and begins to nibble on her mother and father. They wake up and discover what is going on, take Sedna far out to sea, and cast her overboard. Once again, as in other myths about her, Sedna desperately clings to the side of the boat, prompting her father to chop off her fingers. In this myth, Sedna's severed fingers turn into whales, seals, and fish as they touch the water. Sedna then sinks to the bottom of the sea, where she lives, ruler of the underworld, keeping guard over the ungrateful dead. These include her own parents, who have been devoured by sea animals.

So why name a celestial object after a gruesome, murderous child? The not-quite-a-planet is thought to be very dark and very cold, so the goddess of the Arctic underworld seems perfectly appropriate. That's the same reason Pluto was named for the Roman god of the underworld.

Sedna was actually the second of two recently discovered celestial objects to get a Native American name. In 2002, another large piece of orbiting rock was picked out of the very distant Kuiper Belt, the band of ice-and-rock objects at the very far reaches of our solar system. This rock was named Quaoar. The word comes from the Creation myth of the Tongva people, who are sometimes called the San Gabrielino Indians. The Tongva people lived in the Los Angeles area before the arrival of the Spanish and other Europeans.

Not exactly a god in the traditional sense, Quaoar is seen as the great force of Creation, who literally performs a "song and dance."

When Quaoar dances and sings, the first sky father is born. This pair continues to sing and dance, and then the Earth Mother comes into existence. Now a trio, they all sing together, and grandfather sun comes to life. As each emerging deity joins the festivities, the song becomes more complex and the dance more complicated. Grandmother moon, the goddess of the sea, the lord of dreams and visions, the bringer of food and harvests, the goddess of the underworld all eventually join in the singing, dancing, and creating, which is completed when the "earth diver" Frog brings up soil, and the other animals dance on it until it becomes the flat, wide earth. Such are the musical and mythical adventures of Quaoar.

MYTHIC VOICES.

By the shore of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, At the doorway of his wigwam, In the pleasant Summer morning, Hiawatha stood and waited.

All the air was full of freshness, All the earth was bright and joyous....

-HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, The Song of Hiawatha (1855) What famous poem contributed to the "myth" of the Native Americans?

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when most American schoolchildren were forced to memorize at least some part of a piece of Americana that shaped their views about the Native Americans. Though its popularity has long since declined, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epic poem, The Song of Hiawatha, is still found in the pantheon of American verse. It also inspired a 1952 Disney cartoon that did little to broaden our understanding of Native American traditions.

Written in 1855, The Song of Hiawatha employs twenty-two long sections to tell the story of an Ojibway Indian called Hiawatha, whose life is full of triumphs and tragedies. The poem recounts the somewhat miraculous birth of Hiawatha in a time of turmoil between tribes, how he grows to become a great hunter and woos and weds the beautiful but doomed Minnehaha, commencing a golden age that will carry him toward further trials and adventures. The poem ends with the coming of the white men called "Black Robes," who bring the Christian gospel, and Hiawatha's own symbolic departure into the sunset in his canoe. As he leaves his people, to whom he has brought peace, he tells them to listen to the wisdom of the Black Robes: But my guests I leave behind me; Listen to their words of wisdom, Listen to the truth they tell you, For the Master of Life has sent them From the land of light and morning!

Though it may sound to modern ears like Christian-mission propaganda, Longfellow (18071882) meant well. Writing his melodic paean in the heroic style of old sagas, he was trying to capture a sense of the humanity and nobility he saw in the Native American experience. His poetic sentiments were based on the anthropological writings of the first "experts" of his day, who were certainly not Native Americans. Most were people of European descent, who may have truly believed that the natives benefited from the coming of the white man. Along with Longfellow, these well-meaning "experts" helped create, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a highly romanticized myth of America as a "New Eden," and the native people as "noble savages." The latter concept was coined by the influential French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed that true men of nature were proud and uncorrupted by civilization.

Longfellow's poem became standard classroom fare for more than a century. As it did, it left the impression that Hiawatha had done his people a great favor by leaving them in the hands of the "Black Robes." According to the poem, God Himself-the "Master of Life"-sent these Christian missionaries "from the land of light and morning" to speak "words of wisdom." It sounded like a good deal. But, in truth, the paternalistic missionaries weren't concerned with much besides bringing the "savages" to Jesus. Then there were the great masses of Americans who, by the mid-nineteenth century and certainly after "Custer's last stand" in 1876, agreed with the popular notion that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." Of course, the grim testimony of history shows that last sentiment largely won out.

While Longfellow may have had good intentions in helping foster the "noble savage" myth, he also took poetic license with a few facts, beginning with the name of the poem's chief character. The name Hiawatha-which the poet apparently used because it fit his meter-comes from the Hodenosaunee. Commonly called the Iroquois, the Hodenosaunee lived in the Northeast, and their name meant "the people of the long house." Yet Longfellow sets Hiawatha among the Chippewa, a tribe of the Great Lakes in the Midwest.

Which raises another question: Did a person called Hiawatha exist? According to Hodenosaunee history and lore, the answer is yes. Hiawatha was a leader in precolonial America, who probably lived during the 1500s and is credited with helping establish peace among the five major tribes-the Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas-who once dominated what is now Upstate New York.

For years, these tribes had been torn by raids and counterraids, in which captives were either tortured to death or, in some cases, adopted into the tribe to replace a lost family member. According to tribal legend, Hiawatha of the Onondaga had fallen into great grief after years of constant fighting and, in some versions, became a cannibal after his five daughters were killed. He was rescued from his grief and madness by Deganawida, a Huron elder said to be born of a virgin and on a mission to make peace and unite the Iroquois. With Hiawatha acting on what was believed to have been a sacred vision, the two men went from tribe to tribe, persuading them to make peace.

According to Alvin Josephy's 500 Nations, "The Peace Maker, as Deganawida was becoming known, conceived of thirteen laws by which people and nations could live in peace and unity-a democracy where the needs of all would be accommodated without violence and bloodshed. To a modern American, it would suggest a society functioning under values and laws similar to those of the Ten Commandments and the U.S. Constitution combined. Each of its laws included a moral structure." When one chief balked at the plan, Hiawatha was able to persuade him to change his mind. According to tribal legend, the reluctant chief, Tadadaho, was an evil sorcerer whose hair was a Medusa-like tangle of snakes. Hiawatha-whose name means "he who combs"-smoothed out the tangle of snakes, cured Tadadaho's evil mind, and the Great Law of the Five Tribes was adopted. (A sixth tribe, the Tuscarora, later joined the league.) In fact, as far back as 1751-a quarter of a century before the Declaration of Independence-Benjamin Franklin was inspired, or at least impressed, by the Iroquois League, when he proposed a colonial union in his Albany Plan. "It would be a very strange thing," wrote Franklin, "if six nations of ignorant savages should be capable of forming a scheme for such a union, and be able to execute it in such a fashion that it has subsisted for ages and appears indissoluble; and yet that a like union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to which it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous."

Franklin's blueprint for a colonial union failed. But there are many historians who believe that in 1789, the principles of the Iroquois Confederacy were studied by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. However, the men who wrote the U.S. Constitution chose not to include the aspect of the Native American plan that gave men and women equality. That would not be a feature of the U.S. Constitution until 1920. So much for Franklin's "ignorant savages."

MYTHIC VOICES.

There can be no peace as long as we wage war upon our mother, the earth. Responsible and courageous actions must be taken to realign ourselves with the great laws of nature. We must meet this crisis now, while we still have time. We offer these words as common peoples in support of peace, equity, justice, and reconciliation: As we speak, the ice continues to melt in the north.

-OREN LYONS, faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation (August 2000) Do Native American myths still matter?

Remember the movie Poltergeist? You know. The one with the little girl who looks at the fuzzy television screen and says, "They're here." Made in 1982, the movie centers on a haunted house in a suburban development built over an American Indian burial ground.

What about Close Encounters of the Third Kind? This 1977 movie depicts benevolent aliens arriving on earth for a "close encounter" at Devil's Tower, the 1,200-foot-tall rock that seemingly erupts out of the earth in northeastern Wyoming. A popular tourist destination, especially for rock climbers, Devil's Tower is known to some Plains tribes as Mato Tipila, or Bear's Lodge, and it is sacred land to at least twenty-three native groups. Both Poltergeist and Close Encounters, which are the products of Steven Spielberg's fertile imagination, touch upon an issue of great importance to many Native Americans-what modern society is doing to their sacred spaces and religious traditions.

The Devil's Tower controversy is a case in point. On one side of the standoff are Wyoming state officials, the National Parks Service-and rock climbers-who stand for tourism and recreation. On the other side of the argument are the Native Americans who revere Bear's Lodge as a sacred place and want to restore its native name. Writing about this landmark in Sacred Lands of Indian America, historian Jake Page points out that "in its presence it is easy to understand why climbers are drawn to it. Easy enough to understand if you are not an Indian. For Indians, climbing the tower is an invasion of the sacred. One has to wonder what it would feel like to Christians if the steeples of churches and cathedrals suddenly became climbing destinations."

The fight over Devil's Tower, like the conflict over the construction of a large telescope near Tucson, Arizona, on Mount Graham, a mountain sacred to the Apaches, pits powerful economic interests against ancient tribal traditions. It is a fight being waged in various places around America, as development projects with a variety of purposes, including ski resorts, new highways running through reservations, and mineral rights, proliferate. These enterprises often collide headfirst with Native American sacred spaces that, to the uninformed, seem like open land or wilderness, completely suitable for modern development.

In other words, the myths-the sacred stories-of the people who have been in America longest are crashing headfirst against the desires and wishes of the federal government, science, developers, and, yes, rock climbers. These controversies have embroiled U.S. courts and Congress during the past decade in a face-off between native beliefs and government control.

In 1990, for instance, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could regulate Native American religions that employed the use of peyote, a natural hallucinogen. In a majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, "It may be fairly said that leaving accommodation to the political process will place at a relative disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged in; but that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred." (Emphasis added.) Scalia's opinion meant Congress-or other government bodies-can pass laws that regulate religious expression. The First Amendment, it would seem, goes only so far.*

Seeing the danger to religious expression posed by the decision and Scalia's opinion, many mainstream religious groups and other civil rights groups asked the court to reconsider, but their petition was denied. In response, Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in 1993, and the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments in 1994, which restored a measure of protection for Native American religions, including the use of peyote in traditional sacraments. In 1997, the Supreme Court declared RFRA unconstitutional. The court ruled that Congress had overstepped its power to legislate constitutional rights when it passed a law attempting to protect religious observances from government regulation. (Peyote use for religious ceremonies was unaffected by the decision.) Congress had also stepped into controversial territory when it passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), signed into law by President George Bush in 1990. Designed to protect American Indian grave sites from looting and archaeological investigation, NAGPRA also required museums to repatriate certain tribal objects to their tribes of origin. (The bill applies only to federal lands, not private property.) For centuries, Indian burial sites have been systematically looted of skeletons and burial objects. While many states have enacted similar legislation, removing bodies or objects from Indian graves is not a crime in many states. NAGPRA was invoked in the case of Kennewick man, the oldest known skeletal remains in North America, but in 2004, a federal court ruled that these remans were not covered, since Kennewick man was apparently unrelated to any tribe.

But there the situation stands. Religion and myths are still in the eyes of the beholder, as historian Jake Page convincingly demonstrates in his book In the Hands of the Great Spirit: Most non-Indians do not look out upon the landscape and see spirits out there, spirits of such things as trees and rocks and lightning and wind. Indeed, such beliefs are considered by most Christians, at least, to be pagan and improper, even childish, and many conservative Christians today find such beliefs the work of the devil, just as the Puritans and the Spanish Franciscans and French Jesuits did five hundred years ago, in what one would like to think were less enlightened times. On the other hand, many traditional Indians find it peculiar, to say the least, that Christians and others can build a house for God, go there once or maybe twice a week, and whenever it seems like a good idea, proceed to tear God's house down and build another one, with say a bigger parking lot, on the other side of town. If the gods reside in a mountain, it is not so easy to relocate them. For Indians, a sacred site remains sacred under most circumstances.

THE MYTHS OF THE PACIFIC.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there were few places on earth unseen or unspoiled by Europeans and the rest of the "civilized" world. Most of these "last places" were islands in the vast Pacific Ocean, which occupies fully one-third of the earth's surface area. These islands would soon experience a replay of the same ruthless colonial story that had become the sad biography of Africa and the Americas.

There are literally tens of thousands of islands arranged in a rough triangle in the Pacific Ocean, with Hawaii in the north, New Zealand in the south, and Easter Island (so named by a Dutch explorer who found it on Easter Sunday in 1722) in the east. Inhabited by people who had moved out of southwestern Asia tens of thousands of years ago, the people of the Pacific islands and Australia may have island-hopped on foot when ocean levels were 400 to 600 feet lower, perhaps also using boats to settle these islands. Many of these early ocean voyagers developed separate mythologies often traceable to the Polynesians. Polynesia, which means "many islands," occupies the largest area in the South Pacific, stretching from Midway Island in the north to New Zealand, 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers) to the south. While not part of Polynesia, Hawaii in the northern Pacific was first settled by Polynesians 2,000 years ago, and the island's myths reflect that tradition.

MYTHIC MILESTONES.

Australia and the Pacific Islands Before the Common Era c. 80006000 Land bridge connecting Australia and Tasmania disappears; rising sea also covers New Guinea land bridge.

c. 6000 Migrations from southeastern Asia to Pacific islands.

c. 4000 Austronesians reach southwestern Pacific islands.

c. 2500 The dingo introduced to Australia from southeastern Asia.

c. 1500 Earliest evidence of colonization of Fiji.

c. 1000 Polynesian culture emerges on Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa.

Common Era c. 300 Easter Island is settled.

c. 850 Polynesian ancestors of Maori settle New Zealand.

1000 First carvings and stone statues on Easter Island.

1606 Portuguese explorer Luis Vaez de Torres sails around New Guinea and discovers Australia.

1642 Dutch explorer Abel Tasman finds Tasmania and New Zealand; over the next several years he will find and map Tonga, Fiji, New Guinea, and coasts of Australia.

1768 British captain James Cook's first of three voyages of discovery into the Pacific; in 1772, on his second voyage, Cook reaches Botany Bay, Australia, and claims it for Britain; in 1779, on his third voyage, Cook is killed in the Hawaiian Islands.

1788 First British settlement at Botany Bay, Australia.

First penal settlement established at Port Jackson (future Sydney), and the "first fleet" of convicts lands in New South Wales.

1789 Smallpox ravages the Aborigines of New South Wales in Australia.

Mutiny on the HMS Bounty; mutineers settle on Pitcairn Island.

1797 First Christian missionaries reach Tahiti.

1810 Hawaiian islands united by King Kamehameha.

1851 Gold discovered in Australia; thousands of settlers flock to Victoria, Australia.

1864 The practice of transporting prisoners to Australia is abolished.

1892 The queen of Hawaii is deposed; U.S. troops move to annex the islands.

1894 Sanford Dole proclaims the Republic of Hawaii. Hawaii is annexed by the United States in 1894 and made a U.S. territory in 1900.

Which mythic character created the Pacific Islands?

Probably the most famous Polynesian demigod was the trickster Maui, for whom the Hawaiian island of Maui is named. According to some myths, the trickster Maui is born very small, so his mother throws him away in the ocean. Surviving this attempted infanticide, Maui grows up into an oversexed trickster hero, who creates the Pacific islands by fishing them up from the bottom of the sea. The possessor of a prodigious penis, as so many tricksters are, Maui is chosen to satisfy the boundless desire of the goddess Hina. Both the bringer of fire and the cause of death, he is also credited with slowing down the sun to make days longer, either by using the jawbone of his dead grandmother or by lassoing the sun with a rope made from Hina's hair.

In one Polynesian myth, Maui is challenged by the sun god to enter the body of the goddess of death and pass from her vagina to her mouth. If he succeeds, Maui will become immortal. Attempting to accomplish this feat as the goddess sleeps, Maui is foiled when a bird sees him and laughs, waking the sleeping goddess. She kills Maui, ensuring that humanity would always suffer death.

MYTHIC VOICES.

The most puzzling question for whites was...why these people should display such a marked sense of territory while having no apparent cult of private property.... Certainly they had few external signs of religious belief: no temples or altars or priests, no venerated images set up in public places, no evidence of sacrifice or of communal prayer.... They carried their conception of the sacred, of mythic time and ancestral origins with them as they walked. These were embodied in the landscape; every hill and valley, each kind of animal and tree, had its place in a systematic but unwritten whole. Take away this territory and they were deprived not of "property"...but of their embodied history, their locus of myth, their "dreaming".... To deprive the Aborigines of their territory...was to condemn them to spiritual death.

-ROBERT HUGHES, The Fatal Shore What is Dreamtime?

A different but very rich tradition of the Pacific world belongs to the ancestors of today's Aborigines, or indigenous people,*who first arrived in Australia from southeastern Asia perhaps as much as 65,000 years ago. Rock engravings in Australia have been dated to 45,000 years ago, and evidence of the world's first known cremation dates to 26,000 years ago in southern Australia. Presumably these people had hopscotched the land bridge that existed between the Pacific islands at times when Ice Age climate kept sea levels lower than they are today. The number of Aborigines in Australia at the time the British arrived to create a massive penal colony in 1788 range from 300,000 to 750,000 people, scattered among at least 500 tribes. As in Africa and the Americas, a number of diverse factors nearly brought about the extinction of the Aboriginal people. These factors included disease, fighting with the British colonists, and the general depredations of a colonized people losing their land and traditional ways of life.

According to a very ancient Aboriginal Creation myth, all life today is part of a connected universe that goes back to the great spirit ancestors who existed in Dreamtime. While many tribes have variations on this concept, the idea of Dreamtime, or the Dreaming, is almost universal in Australia. It goes like this: In the beginning, the earth was in darkness. Life existed below the surface, sleeping. In the Dreaming world, the ancestor beings broke through the crust of the earth, and the sun rose out of the ground. The ancestors then traveled the land and began to shape it, creating the mountains and other features of the landscape along with all the animals, plants, and other natural elements. They also created society, teaching the songs, dances, and ceremonial rituals, and leaving behind spirits of people yet to be born. Finally, tired from this activity, the mythical ancestors sank back into earth and returned to sleep. These beings never died, but merged with nature to live on in sacred beliefs and rituals. Some of their spirits were turned into rocks, trees, or other sacred places that dot the Australian landscape.

Dreamtime is more than just a period in the past-it is ever present, and reached through sacred rituals such as the walkabout, a tribal spiritual journey taken to sacred places to renew the clan's relationship with Dreaming and the sacred landscape. An individual can go on walkabout to where the tribe originally came from, or some other place of sacred "belongingness."

Other tribal variations of native Australian myth often include a rainbow serpent-a powerful spirit of creation and fertility-whose curving movement through the sands creates river beds and other natural features. When treated carefully, the snake sleeps, but if disturbed, it creates storms and flooding. One of these snakes, called Yorlunggur, lives by a water hole. When one of two sisters falls into the hole, her menstrual blood pollutes the water, angering the serpent. The snake swallows the sisters and causes a great flood. When the floodwaters recede, the snake spits out the sisters, and the place where this happened becomes the sacred spot where adolescent boys are initiated into adulthood, a central rite for native Australians.

Another great ancestral snake called Bobbi-bobbi is responsible for what may be Australia's most identifiable "icon." The serpent drives flying-fox squirrels out into the open for people to eat, but these elusive creatures are not easy to kill. From his underground hiding place, the great serpent sees the difficulty and tosses one of his ribs up to a group of men. This becomes the first boomerang, which the men use to kill the flying foxes. Later, the men throw the boomerang into the sky and make a hole, which makes Bobbi-bobbi angry, so he takes the boomerang back for a time.