Ayâs, the Deserted Boy

Ayâs is the deserted-boy hero of the great James Bay Cree epic. His jealous father, called Aioswé in the version Alanson Skinner recorded at Rupert House, strands him on an island of gull eggs; a sea being carries him back across the water — in the coastal telling a walrus, which is killed by lightning when the boy conceals the approaching thunder — and a spirit grandmother feeds him and arms him with items of power against the dangerous beings that line the road home. Reaching home at last, he finds his mother mistreated, takes his revenge, and sets the old world on fire, an ending remembered in the Rupert House telling as the burning of the world. The legend was still being told in Cree on the west coast of James Bay in the 1950s, and it remains part of the living repertoire of Cree storytellers.

Domains

• endurance
• world fire

Powers

• to survive abandonment and the perilous road home with the aid of spirit helpers
• to set the old world ablaze in retribution when he returns home

Sources

• Skinner, Alanson. Notes on the Eastern Cree and Northern Saulteaux. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 9, pt. 1. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1911.
• Ellis, C. Douglas, ed. âtalôhkâna nêsta tipâcimôwina / Cree Legends and Narratives from the West Coast of James Bay. Publications of the Algonquian Text Society. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1995.