The birds tell Hailibu that the valley will flood and the volcanoes will erupt, and he must explain where he heard the information to get his people to leave. At that, Hailibu turns to stone, and the villagers place the stone on top of the mountain and venerate it for generation after generation.

The Sable God

Another famed hunter is immortalized in the story of the Sable God. He is Balu Ulu of the Murcha tribe of the Qiakala Manchu. Balu Ulu is remembered as a brave baturu, or hero, and his name lives even today in these tales.

Hailibu the hunter drove off the crane before it could devour the small white snake.

Ulu was the son of a master archer serving Seho, the chief of the tribe. At his death, Ulu’s father left him three invaluable things: a heavy bow with an iron back and inlaid with silver; three arrows, fletched with eagle feathers, that would penetrate anything shot at; and a gray horse that could run a thousand miles in a single day.  No one in the village could bend the bow except Ulu, who had learned from his father.  No animal could escape his arrows.

Ulu constructed a small hut beside the graves of his father and mother, and every day he went out to hunt.  Now in the forest nearby, there lived a beautiful sable.  The sable was often seen sitting on a large green rock, which all the hunters agreed was the keystone rock of the mountain.  They knew that the sable was in fact the Sable God, the Manchu god of hunting.  Far from hunting him, the hunters often brought the sable food, and they even bowed to him as they passed his rock.

But one day, as the sable sat sunning himself, a monster came from who knows where, snapped him up, and ran away with him in his mouth.  None of the hunters dared to follow, and none of them had the courage to go into the forest and hills to hunt.  All the households were reduced to using their stores of dried meat and fish, and soon even these were nearly gone.