Soon there was another raven cry outside, and the old man said to himself, “Now my wife is coming,” and sure enough in a little while the old woman came in and sat down by her husband.
Then the young man knew they were Raven Mockers and he was frightened and kept very quiet.
Said the old man to his wife, “Well, what luck did you have?” “None,” said the old woman, “there were too many doctors watching.
What luck did you have?” “I got what I went for,” said the old man, “there is no reason to fail, but you never have luck.
Take this and cook it and let’s have something to eat.” She fixed the fire and then the young man smelled meat roasting and thought it smelled sweeter than any meat he had ever tasted.
He peeped out from one eye, and it looked like a man’s heart roasting on a stick.
Suddenly the old woman said to her husband, “Who is over in the corner?” “Nobody,” said the old man.
“Yes, there is,” said the old woman, “I hear him snoring,” and she stirred the fire until it blazed and lighted up the whole place, and there was the young man lying in the corner.
He kept quiet and pretended to be asleep.
The old man made a noise at the fire to wake him, but still he pretended to sleep.
Then the old man came over and shook him, and he sat up and rubbed his eyes as if he had been asleep all the time.
Now it was near daylight and the old woman was out in the other house getting breakfast ready, but the hunter could hear her crying to herself.
“Why is your wife crying?” he asked the old man.
“Oh, she has lost some of her friends lately and feels lonesome,” said her husband; but the young man knew that she was crying because he had heard them talking.
When they came out to breakfast the old man put a bowl of corn mush before him and said, “This is all we have—we have had no meat for a long time.” After breakfast the young man started on again, but when he had gone a little way the old man ran after him with a fine piece of beadwork and gave it to him, saying, “Take this, and don’t tell anybody what you heard last night, because my wife and I are always quarreling that way.” The young man took the piece, but when he came to the first creek he threw it into the water and then went on to the settlement.
There he told the whole story, and a party of warriors started back with him to kill the Raven Mockers.
When they reached the place it was seven days after the first night.
They found the old man and his wife lying dead in the house, so they set fire to it and burned it and the witches together.
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 depicts a worldview where specific beings (Raven Mockers) possess supernatural agency, can shapeshift or disguise themselves, and inhabit the landscape as distinct spiritual entities.
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 central plot revolves around the 'Raven Mockers' who disguise themselves as an old couple and cook human hearts, demonstrating the capacity of these beings to alter their form and deceive through appearance.