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As the Koyukon reckon it, all things human and natural go back to a time called ’adonts’idnee, which is so remote that no one can explain or understand how long ago it really was. But however ancient this time may be, its events are recounted accurately and in great detail through a prodigious number of stories. ’adonts’idnee (literally, “in Distant Time it is said”) is the Koyukon word for these stories, but following from its conversational use I will translate it simply as Distant Time.

The stories constitute an oral history of the Koyukon people and their environment, beginning in an age before the present order of existence was established. During this age “the animals were human” – that is, they had human form, they lived in a human society, and they spoke human (Koyukon) language. At some point in the Distant Time certain humans died and were transformed into animal or plant beings, the species that inhabit Koyukon country today. These dreamlike meta-morphoses left a residue of human qualities and personality traits in the north-woods creatures.

Taken together, the Distant Time stories describe a primordial world and its transfiguration into modern form. Some are so long that a single narration may require many evenings, even several weeks of evenings, for a complete telling. Stories of this kind – widely known as legends, myths, or folklore – are found throughout North America and elsewhere. It is common practice, however, to vastly underrate their significance in the lives of people like the Koyukon. They are not regarded as simple entertainment (though they are appreciated as such), and they are certainly not considered fictional. Stories of the Distant Time are, first of all, an accounting of origins. They are a Koyukon version of Genesis, or perhaps of Darwin. Woven into the plots of many stories are innumerable subplots or asides, which often describe the origins of natural entities.

The scope of Distant Time stories ranges from the minute to the cosmological. They explain the beginnings of entities that inhabit the sky – the sun, moon, and aurora. They account for certain weather phenomena, such as thunderstorms, which are the transformed embodiment of a formerly human spirit. For this reason thunderstorms have consciousness and can be turned away by people who know how to influence them. Features of the earth, such as prominent hills or mountains, are also given some accounting in these stories. For example, a hill near Huslia is called “Giant’s Firemakers” (Yiłkuh tł’ aala’), because it was formed when a giant man lost his flints there.

A central figure in this ancient world was the Raven (it is unclear, perhaps irrelevant, whether there was one Raven or many), who was its creator and who engineered many of its metamorphoses. Raven, the contradiction – omnipotent clown, benevolent mischief-maker, buffoon, and deity. It was he, transformed into a spruce needle, who was swallowed by a woman so she would give birth to him as a boy. When the boy was old enough to play, he took from beneath a blanket in her house the missing sun and rolled it to the door. Once outside, he became Raven again and flew up to return the sun to the sky, making the earth light again.

And it was he who manipulated the natural design to suit his whim or fancy. When he first created the earth, for example, the rivers ran both ways, upstream on one side and downstream on the other. But this made life too easy for humans, he decided, because their boats could drift along in either direction without paddling. So Raven altered his creation and made the rivers flow only one way, which is how they remain today.

There are hundreds of stories explaining the behavior and appearance of living things. Most of these are about animals and a few are about plants. No species is too insignificant to be mentioned, but importance in the Koyukon economy does not assure a prominent place in the stories. Many of the stories about animal origins are like this one:

When the burbot [ling cod] was human, he decided to leave the land and become a water animal. So he started down the bank, taking a piece of bear fat with him. But the other animal people wanted him to stay and tried to hold him back, stretching him all out of shape in the process. This is why the burbot has such a long, stretched-out body, and why its liver is rich and oily like the bear fat its ancestor carried to the water long ago.

At the end of Distant Time there was a great catastrophe. The entire earth was covered by a flood, and under the Raven’s supervision a pair of each species went aboard a raft. These plants and animals survived, but when the flood ended they could no longer behave like people. All the Distant Time humans had been killed, and so Raven recreated people in their present form. My Koyukon teachers were well aware of the biblical parallel in this story, and they took it as added evidence of the story’s accuracy. None suggested that it might be a reinterpretation of Christian teaching.

Distant Time stories were usually told by older people who had memorized the lengthy epics and could best interpret them. But children were also taught stories, simpler ones that they were encouraged to tell, especially as they began to catch game. Doing this after setting out their traps or snares would please the animals and make them willing to be caught.

Today’s elders can recall the long evenings of their youth, when Distant Time stories made the hours of darkness pass easily. In those days houses were lit by burning bear grease in a shallow bowl with a wick, or by burning long wands of split wood, one after another. Bear grease was scarce, and the hand-held wands were inconvenient, so in midwinter the dwellings were often dark after twilight faded. Faced with long wakeful hours in the blackness, people crawled into their warm beds and listened to the recounting of stories.

The narratives were reserved for late fall and the first half of winter, because they were tabooed after the days began lengthening. Not surprisingly, the teller finished each story by commenting that he or she had shortened the winter: “I thought that winter had just begun, but now I have chewed off part of it.” Or, more optimistically, “When I woke up in the morning, my cabin was just dripping with water!” In this case the narrator implies that the spring thaw has suddenly begun.

Distant Time stories also provide the Koyukon with a foundation for understanding the natural world and humanity’s proper relationship to it. When people discuss the plants, animals, or physical environment they often refer to the stories. Here they find explanations for the full range of natural phenomena, down to the smallest details. In one story a snowshoe hare was attacked by the hawk owl, which was so small that it only managed to make a little wound in its victim’s shoulder. Koyukon people point out a tiny notch in the hare’s scapula as evidence that the Distant Time events really took place.

The narratives also provide an extensive code of proper behavior toward the environment and its resources. They contain many episodes showing that certain kinds of actions toward nature can have bad consequences, and these are taken as guidelines to follow today. Stories therefore serve as a medium for instructing young people in the traditional code and as an infallible standard of conduct for everyone.

Nobody made it up, these things we’re supposed to do. It came from the stories; it’s just like our Bible. My grandfather said he told the stories because they would bring the people good luck, keep them healthy, and make a good life. When he came to songs in the stories, he sang them like they were hymns.

The most important parts of the code are taboos (hutłaanee), prohibitions against acting certain ways toward nature. For example, in one story a salmon-woman was scraping skins at night with her upper jaw, and while doing this she was killed. This is why it is taboo for women to scrape hides during the night. Hundreds of such taboos exist, and a person who violates them (or someone in the immediate family) may suffer bad luck in subsistence activities, clumsiness, illness, accident, or early death. In Koyukuk River villages it is a rare day when someone is not heard saying, “Hutlanee!” (“It’s taboo!”).