The long text was produced originally in Tsimshian with an interlinear English translation by one of Boas's collaborators, Mr. Henry W. Tate, whom Boas described as "a full-blood Indian of Port Simpson, British Columbia." With the help of another native, Boas revised both Tate's "original" Tsimshian text and the English translation before publishing them on facing pages in 1912.2 It is not known how Mr. Tate obtained the Tsimshian text. It seems unlikely that he got it by dictation from another story-teller, because Boas attributed to Tate himself certain objectionable grammatical features of the original Tsimshian text which Tate gave him. But whether Henry Tate composed the story from his own memory of tradition, or paraphrased some telling of it which he had recently heard from one or more other persons; how much knowledge of Tsimshian tradition about Asdiwal those informants might have shared and agreed upon; and whether Tate's version represents one or a pastiche of several traditional tales -- all such questions are now quite unanswerable except by way of surmise. Lévi-Strauss accepted the 1912 text simply and uncritically as a single, internally consistent artifact of Tsimshian culture.

    Boas intended his literal English translation of the Story of Asdiwal as a help in reading the Tsimshian text. It is seldom elegant English, but its literalness often helps as much in understanding the ideas in the tale as in understanding the unfamiliar Tsimshian language of the original. It was still imagined in 1912 that for good and profitable relations with the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest Americans of European ancestry would need to learn such languages as Tsimshian, and Boas' publication of native texts with literal translations was meant to advance that cause.

    Lévi-Strauss made use of the Story of Asdiwal for entirely other purposes, as have most others after him. He was interested rather in the relationship between myth and social organization. He gave no indication of just what his conscious reasons were for choosing that story in particular from among so many other good recorded Tsimshian tales; it may have been little more than accident. As a respectable social anthropologist should, Lévi-Strauss strove primarily for a more exact science of society, but he was also a cultivated Frenchman who might have been expected to seek his more perfect social science where there were at least charm and grandeur to reward an investigator, as there are in the Story of Asdiwal.

    It cannot be said that Lévi-Strauss' article in 1958 was a great or durable achievement beyond the stimulus it gave to others later to notice the Tsimshian tale per se. He attempted to relate patterns of Tsimshian marriage to the patterns of motifs in the narrative about Asdiwal with meagre and controversial results on both counts. Then, having made what small profit he could for kinship studies out of the story, he passed on to more promising subjects for his purpose, pausing only briefly before leaving it behind him to admire the design on the surface of the narrative. It was a though a treasure-hunter looking for ancient statuary had unearthed a temple and stayed a moment to admire its architecture before making off with the cult-images. But the temple deserves a larger guerdon of attention, for it is craftily designed, a masterful portrayal of ideal native North American manhood.

    The style used by the unknown Tsimshian story-teller as he began to relate the Story of Asdiwal was abrupt and repetitious. The first paragraph seems confused, as though its author had urgently wanted to say several unrelated things and had blurted them out all at once without stopping to organize his thoughts. The story begins suddenly and alarmingly with a great natural disaster. But before the narrator will tell us how bad the spring famine on the Skeena River really was, he interrupts himself to describe a pair of women whom he seems to have chosen at random, and then he goes into an even more remote explanation about the places where the two women dwelt, as if their whereabouts had some invisible connection with the terrible starvation of their whole people (which of course it does).

Well, when a great famine reached [touched] the people of the Skeena, then a chieftainess was also among the starving people, and a young woman who had married a man of a town way up the river. Her mother, however, was in her own village at Canyon. That town is way down the river, that was when the great famine [touched] the villages.

    This hasty conflation of facts without evident regard for causation or consequence would be repugnant in a piece of literary fiction. But the logic that binds motifs together in oral fable is a logic of association, not of consequence or causation. The first paragraph of this native American tale initiates the familiar oral traditional narrative pattern of the Cosmogonic Triad:

1. An infertile female destined to set terms and establish conditions.

2. A female with animal and aquatic associations destined to unthinking procreativity.

3. A spatial separation of the two females.

    Of course the Tsimshian narrator did not know that his first words deployed three parts of a universal pattern of story. For him, each element of his tale was fully fleshed and clothed in a familiar, specifically Tsimshian form:

    Starting the story required only four elements, and the anonymous conteur needed little time to supply them since he knew from long habit what they should be. But the particular Tsimshian costume worn by each of the initial four motifs implicates still other features of Tsimshian culture which are not explicitly mentioned in the tale. Famine implies faults in the Tsimshian economy; mothers, wives, and daughters constitute only half of Tsimshian society; the Skeena river is a major axis of Tsimshian transhumance; and so forth.

    Thus not one but two systems of association operate simultaneously in the first paragraph of the Story of Asdiwal: a universal pattern of story holding together three explicit motifs, and a uniquely Tsimshian sub-system of implicit associations which links each motif in the explicit story-pattern to various other features of the culture where the Story of Asdiwal was told. By means of only four motifs in a prefabricated pattern, the narrator was able in a few seconds of speech to evoke a dozen sets of distinction that were basic components of Tsimshian culture.

    The most obvious such distinction is between food and famine. Next, the two women are singled out from among the whole starving people, forming a distinction: society ~ individuals. The two ladies are noble, as opposed to commoners and persons of mixed descent, which were the two lower castes of Tsimshian society. The older woman lives at Canyon, which was the eastern frontier of traditionally Tsimshian territory, while her daughter has married and gone to live with a man whose home is beyond the Tsimshian frontier, in the territory of a neighboring people, the Gitskan tribe.

    As a chieftainess, the mother has a hierarchical function of authority which her daughter, who is not a chieftainess, does not. But her daughter enjoys a reciprocal advantage to offset the disadvantage of inferior authority; being young, she may more easily expect progeny than her mother, who already has a grown and married daughter. Further, the River Skeena has an upstream and a downstream aspect, and provides a distinction: land ~ water.

    On the principle that a society's culture consists of distinctions customarily shared in the minds of its members, all the distinctions conjured up by the words of the first paragraph in the Story of Asdiwal may be taken in sum as an incomplete but recognizable sketch of basic components in Tsimshian life:

    The twelve contrasts in this chiaroscuro portrayal of Tsimshian life are not necessarily the native ideas which an alien anthropologist would have chosen to begin a scientific ethnography of the Tsimshian. But they are nevertheless a recognizable (if incomplete) model of the Tsimshian world. They are in effect a short Tsimshian ethnography of Tsimshian. As the embodiment of that model, the first two sentences in the translation of the fable about Asdiwal are full of meaning, despite their superficially unkempt style. The last sentence, however, is a surprise after the dense economy of reference before it. By contrast, it is pure chiastic redundance, and adds nothing to the story except emphasis, like a cadent repetition in poetry, since every Tsimshian would know where Canyon is, mid-way along the course of the Skeena river.

    Once the Tsimshian conteur had constructed the skeletal model of Tsimshian civilization in his first paragraph, he was free to resume the initial subject of famine and its consequences. The destruction of life by famine means more placed where it is in the second paragraph than it would have meant at the very beginning of the tale. First, the culture; then its nemesis.

    Yet for all its severity, the famine is a selective disaster that damages without completely destroying the fabric of relationships woven together in the first paragraph. Many people die of the starvation, and thereby a new distinction arises: the living vs. the dead. But this new contrast entrains two others that preceded it in the first paragraph. Men die, while women survive. Moreover, death that chooses for its victims all the husbands among the stated persons of the tale incidentally destroys the institution of marriage, at least for their wives. So the second paragraph of the story coordinates three sets of contrasts, the second and third contingent on the first:

    There is nothing in the general laws of oral fable that would have prevented the Tsimshian story-teller's continuing his tale with the adventures of the dead husbands. Such things are perfectly possible and even usual in traditional story-telling. In this same tale Asdiwal himself was eventually entertained by a tribe of dead sea-lions whom he personally had earlier slain. But the customary pattern of this particular Tsimshian fable called for the two dead husbands to behave as they would in plain narrative and vanish from the unfolding story of their widowed wives. By this selection of personae, some of the contrasts created at the beginning of the story are now either reduced or completely abolished.

    Initially the famine was only a logical opposite of nourishment, but in the second paragraph food disappears entirely, leaving starvation unopposed. The starvation kills all the male characters, and so far as the story is concerned, the Tsimshian world thereafter consists of only unmarried women. Moreover, the famine chooses its victims with such refinement that it destroys not only the institution of marriage but also the whole of society, sparing only separate individuals in dwellings well isolated from each other.

    Both of the surviving individuals belong to Tsimshian nobility. Tsimshian society had three hereditary castes -- nobles, commoners, and persons of mixed caste parentage -- and it was possible for Tsimshian to marry outside their castes. But there is no vestige of the lower castes left in the story of Asdiwal after the death of the two husbands; only nobles remain, represented by the two women.

    As the story progresses through its third and fourth paragraphs, still more of the original thirteen contrasts are reduced or abolished. The Gitskan (or Gitwunlkal) implications of the younger woman's marriage upriver disappear when her husband's death forcibly dissolves that marriage. Thus the Tsimshian are figuratively thrown back upon their own resources and their own people for whatever restoration of their world may be possible after the famine.

    Each of the widows decides independently (and for her own reasons) to give up trying to live in her village and to make a long journey into the wilderness on an empty stomach in bitterly cold weather. Normal, prudent behaviour and life in a place of fixed winter settlement give way simultaneously to emotionally induced physical risk and a transhumant pattern of life in temporary shelter in the wild that was normal for the Tsimshian only in warm weather.

    So the two women travel toward each other on the frozen river, which is neither water nor dry land but a bad, temporary compromise lacking the best qualities and potential of both the opposed categories which it replaces:

The frozen river yields no food of any kind; it cannot be used for rapid movement by boat; nor is it fit to live on since it will eventually thaw, break up, and flow away. When the Tsimshian economy fails and their social organization is deranged by deaths in late winter, then distinctions of place or geography fail too, as though all the contrasts which compose their world were coordinated in a continuous chain of mutual interdependence.

    Finally mother and daughter meet on the frozen Skeena River at a place that is nowhere, an indeterminate location in the wild not decisively upstream nor down, a place obscurely situated between the two poles of the widows' permanent homes upriver and downriver as established at the beginning of the story. There cold, hunger, and death cancel geographic distinctions entirely, leaving nothing to choose from among:

    Thus each successive reduction of contrast precipitates other similar changes throughout the schematic model of the Tsimshian world as presented in the first paragraph of the tale. This process of reduction is the main effect of paragraphs 2-6, but a few new contrasts in addition to the original thirteen are also created here. With their world falling to pieces around them, mother and daughter remember each other. Their memories are the very essence of contrast between:

Then one day the chieftainess talked to herself when she was hungry: therefore she said, "I remember when I used to meet my daughter." Then the young woman also said, "I remember (think) when I meet my mother when I go down the river, when I go near her, then I shall eat food, then I shall have enough to eat."