The Skeleton Woman

As told in "Women Who Run With The Wolves"

"The Skeleton Woman"Sedna, legend tells, was a beautiful girl who lived by the sea. Although many courted her, she would not leave her widowed father, and refused them all. But one day, a raven disguised as a handsome man came to her. He promised her a better life - and best of all, he promised he would also provide for her father. And so, full of hope, Sedna left with him. But he took her instead to a desolate island, where she was cold and hungry. When her father came at last to visit, he grew very angry. Taking Sedna into his kayak, he paddled into the open sea, but Raven caused a terrible storm to arise. And Sedna's terrified father, in desperation, hoping to save his own life, cast his daughter from the boat. Sedna clung to the side of the kayak, and would not let go, until her father cut off her hands with his knife. Then Sedna's hands and fingers fell into the sea, becoming the the fishes, the seals, and the whales. And handless Sedna sank to the bottom of the ocean to become the skeleton woman.

One day a fisherman came fishing, he had drifted far from his homeplace and did not know that local fisherman stayed away from this bay, saying it was haunted. When a heavy pull on the his line drags his kayak to sea, he thinks he has caught the "big one," a fish so large he can eat for weeks, a fish so fat that he will prosper ever after. As he daydreams about his coming ease, what he reels up is Skeleton Woman, a woman flung from a cliff long ago, her fish-eaten carcass left to rot at the bottom of the sea. In terror her flings her from his kayak and paddles with all his might for shore. Skeleton Woman is so snarled in his fishing line that she is dragged behind the fisherman wherever he goes. She is pulled across the water, over the beach, and into his house, where he collapses in the darkness in terror.

Thinking he has lost her, he falls into an exhausted sleep. The fisherman wakes in the morning, and lights his whale oil lamp, and there lies Sedna the skeleton woman. A pile of bones and fishline tangled on his floor. Perhaps it was the softness of the lamplight, or that he had passed the night unharmed by her, but feeling pity for her, slowly disentangles her. Muttering words like a mother to a child he untangles first her toes, then her ankles and so he works through the night gently untangling her. When her bones are in order, he dresses her in furs to keep her warm, and exhausted falls asleep. During the night, Skeleton Woman scratches and crawls her way across the floor, drinks the tears of the dreaming fisherman, and grows anew her flesh and heart and body. Her flesh from his flesh, her heart from his heart, the fisherman wakes to find himself wrapped up with a beautiful woman.

The people who cannot remember how she came to her first ill-fortune now say she and the fisherman went away and were consistently well-fed by the creatures she had known in her life underwater.