Another tale from the same region has a brother living with his sister in a place far away from other people. On a night brightly lit by the moon, as in the other story, they decide to go hunt for marsupials. The brother takes up his bow and arrows and the sister packs up some food for their trip, sweet potatoes which she will cook for them. They head off into the forest.
After a long time they arrive at a cave in an area where there are lots of marsupials. The brother helps his sister to make a fire and cook the sweet potatoes. When the food is cooked he tells her to grate the potatoes, then he leaves to hunt marsupials. The sister takes a stone ax and begins to grate the sweet potatoes. While doing so the ax slips and cuts her finger badly. The blood squirts copiously out of her finger and puddles all around her. She screams and cries out until her brother hears and comes running.
Seeing all the blood and his sister in such pain, in dismay the brother says they must return home. Right away they set off again, in the moonlight, the brother holding the sister to keep her from crying. But the sister still feels terrible. She’s worried about her finger and she’s not at all happy with her brother, who told her to grate the sweet potatoes like that with the ax. When they pass by a tree with a big hole in it, the sister turns and walks straight into the hole and turns into a marsupial.
Her brother sees this and calls out to her to come back, but she does not listen. The sister recriminates with him about the ax and the sweet potatoes, and that because she did as he said to she cut her finger. She says she was so troubled that she turned into a marsupial. Then she tells him to return home and not to worry about her. The brother does as he is told, except that he does worry, very much. He begins to cry and he cries all the way home.
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I say, can anything be truer to life? There you are doing a job, everything is going so well, you’re behaving very nicely, and suddenly there’s blood everywhere and pain. Sometimes you just can’t win, that’s a fact. It’s enough to make anybody want to turn into a marsupial.
