When the Wolf chief asked him his business, he said: “I have two bad boys at home, and I want you to go in seven days from now and play ball against them.” Although Kana′tĭ spoke as though he wanted them to play a game of ball, the Wolves knew that he meant for them to go and kill the two boys.
They promised to go.
Then the bird’s down blew off from Kana′tĭ’s shoulder, and the smoke carried it up through the hole in the roof of the townhouse.
When it came down on the ground outside, the Wild Boy took his right shape again and went home and told his brother all that he had heard in the townhouse.
But when Kana′tĭ left the Wolf people he did not return home, but went on farther.
The boys then began to get ready for the Wolves, and the Wild Boy—the magician—told his brother what to do.
They ran around the house in a wide circle until they had made a trail all around it excepting on the side from which the Wolves would come, where they left a small open space.
Then they made four large bundles of arrows and placed them at four different points on the outside of the circle, after which they hid themselves in the woods and waited for the Wolves.
In a day or two a whole party of Wolves came and surrounded the house to kill the boys.
The Wolves did not notice the trail around the house, because they came in where the boys had left the opening, but the moment they went inside the circle the trail changed to a high brush fence and shut them in.
Then the boys on the outside took their arrows and began shooting them down, and as the Wolves could not jump over the fence they were all killed, excepting a few that escaped through the opening into a great swamp close by.
The boys ran around the swamp, and a circle of fire sprang up in their tracks and set fire to the grass and bushes and burned up nearly all the other Wolves.
Only two or three got away, and from these have come all the wolves that are now in the world.
Soon afterward some strangers from a distance, who had heard that the brothers had a wonderful grain from which they made bread, came to ask for some, for none but Selu and her family had ever known corn before.
The boys gave them seven grains of corn, which they told them to plant the next night on their way home, sitting up all night to watch the corn, which would have seven ripe ears in the morning.
These they were to plant the next night and watch in the same way, and so on every night until they reached home, when they would have corn enough to supply the whole people.
The strangers lived seven days’ journey away.
They took the seven grains and watched all through the darkness until morning, when they saw seven tall stalks, each stalk bearing a ripened ear.
They gathered the ears and went on their way.
The next night they planted all their corn, and guarded it as before until daybreak, when they found an abundant increase.
But the way was long and the sun was hot, and the people grew tired.
On the last night before reaching home they fell asleep, and in the morning the corn they had planted had not even sprouted.
They brought with them to their settlement what corn they had left and planted it, and with care and attention were able to raise a crop.
But ever since the corn must be watched and tended through half the year, which before would grow and ripen in a night.
As Kana′tĭ did not return, the boys at last concluded to go and find him.
The Wild Boy took a gaming wheel and rolled it toward the Darkening land.
In a little while the wheel came rolling back, and the boys knew their father was not there.
The doctrine and worldview that natural phenomena, places, and objects possess inherent spirit, soul, or personality — and that the cosmos is populated by countless local, plural, embodied divine agents: kami in mountain and tree, sidhe in cairn and well, landwights in field and stone, nymphs in spring and grove, haltija in forest and lake, lares and penates in household and threshold, Iamblichean daemons in element and place. Distinct from monotheism (single transcendent God), pantheism (one underlying substance), and emanation_hierarchy (cascading single source); animism's signature is the plurality, locality, and embodied-in-landscape character of the divine.
The passage is fundamentally animistic, depicting a world populated by sentient animal spirits (Wolves), a bird-spirit shapeshifter (Kana'ti), and magical forces inherent in natural elements like fire and plants.
Narratives or doctrines of cosmic origin — how heaven, earth, and the primordial deities first came into being. The Kojiki's deities born alone on the Plain of High Heaven, Voluspo's Ginnungagap, Genesis's tohu wa-bohu, the Timaeus's Demiurge fashioning the Receptacle, the Hesiodic Theogony, the Kalevala's egg-cosmogony, Egyptian Nun-and-Atum. Distinct from emanation_hierarchy (structural-ontological cascade), letters_of_creation (mechanism of creation), and apocatastasis/frashokereti (end-state restoration); cosmogony is temporally-narrative beginning.
The story provides an etiological explanation for the origin of wolves in the world and the current agricultural necessity of tending corn, functioning as a myth of origin.
Numbers, proportions, and mathematical relationships as the underlying structure of divine reality.
The number seven appears repeatedly as a structurally significant element in the timeline (seven days), the quantity of corn grains, and the resulting ears, suggesting a ritual or magical significance to this number.
Form-mutability as a constitutional property of divine and preternatural beings — gods, heroes, spirits, and their human practitioners possessing inherent capacity to alter form across human, animal, plant, or elemental states. Loki and Odin's transformations in Norse, Math's pigs and Blodeuwedd's owl-shape and Pwyll's exchange with Arawn in the Mabinogion, the Greek Proteus, the Indian dasavatara, Vainamoinen's bird-flight in the Kalevala, Ovid's metamorphoses, the shamanic and witch's capacity for ritual form-change. Distinct from anthropomorphism (divine taking specific human form, single embodiment) in that anthropomorphism establishes a stable form whereas this concept establishes form's plurality and instability.
The narrative centers on Kana'ti's ability to shift between bird and human forms and the Wild Boy's capacity to change his shape, establishing form-mutability as a key property of the protagonists.