2016/03/31

Week 10 Storytelling - The Dog Husband

There was a girl who loved his dog. She had him around her all the time. One day, she got pregnant and her parents suspected that it was the dog that got her pregnant. They decided to burn the house and killed the dog and the daughter. They burnt their house to let their daughter and the dog to die in fire. But dog woke up before they both die. He turned into a human form and carried the girl away from the house.


"Where am I?"


When the girl woke up, nothing was left in the village. Everyone left. She was confused, but she had to move on for the sake of her babies. With the dog next to her, she moved to the place where she could start a new life.


"We need to start a new life here. You need to help me!"


She told her dog. The dog agreed that he would do anything for her. It was rough to start a whole new life but she had her dog to help her. The dog was always there for her and that all she needed.

Eventually, she gave birth to four male puppies and one female puppy. The dog and the girl were happy to see their child. However, more hunting and works had to be done by both. They both worked hard to feed their puppies until they grew up. When they were finally old enough to go hunt for whales, the dog taught their puppies.


"I think you are ready."


It was one night, the dog decided to teach puppies how to turn into the human form. He gathered all his puppies and transformed.


"You are my children. All of you can do this. All of you can have the form of human."


Five puppies were amazed by their father's transformation. However, they were not the only ones that saw his transformation, the girl, the mother of five puppies, realized that the dog could transformed that night.


"You can become a human? You are just like me? Why didn't you tell me about this? This..This..I wish you would have told me earlier!"


She scolded him and told him that if he stayed as a human from the beginning that everything would had been fine for them. The dog agreed. He told his puppies to stay as human forms as well. With their human bodies, the dog and puppies could hunt for whales more faster and better. They could catch more than enough, they shared the meat of whales to other animals and creatures around them.


One day, A crow told and brought people who left the village. They found out the dog and their puppies were great hunters that could catch enough whales for all of them. The village started to form around the house of the girl and the dog. Later the village got bigger and bigger and formed a great city. The dog, with his human form, became the master chief of the town while his children became chiefs of the town.


Author's note: This is a rewriting about the dog husband. The original story is about the girl who had the dog husband and her children. In the original story, the dog husband was killed by her parents. Therefore, the story was not really about the dog husband but it was about the wife and her puppies. The story is really similar. Her children learned how to hunt whales and eventually become the chiefs of the village which was formed by people who left the village earlier because a crow told them. I wanted to write the story about the dog husband that actually has the dog husband as a main character so title will be more relevant. I think this story was interesting but I think since the dog husband was the title of the tale, more of him should have been told in the story instead of killing him in the beginning of the story.




Bibliography : The Dog-Husband from Marriage Tales from Stith Thompson's anthology, Tales of the North American Indians.

No comments:

Post a Comment