Up to that time Tengir had spent his days drifting through the forest to collect vegetable material and hunt game, and at night he would find a pleasant nook to rest his head wherever he happened to be at that time, without having any fixed habits. He looked upon the world around him and wondered that even if it all could fit in his Sack, there was no way for him to go inside the Sack, and he was sorrowful. He observed that the birds would gather sticks to build a nest, the rodents would burrow themselves into trees, and rabbits and foxes into earthen dens, and he resolved to imitate them.
Thus resolved, he found an unusual boulder that had an auspicious aura to it. He filed it into an parabolic shape and fastened it to a wooden handle, and it became known as the Mowing Scythe. With the remains of that same boulder he produced a ax-head of expert sharpness and fastened it to a wooden handle too, and it became known as the Trimming Ax. He then measured out a space thirty feet by twenty and marked it at the corners with wooden pegs. He cleared out the inside. Those small plants and grasses he mowed with the Scythe while the larger, solid plants and trees he fell with the Ax. He so cleared the land marked off by the pegs and gave it the name House-Field.
That night, he made a fire in the House-Field with the leftover wood and fell into a deep, deathlike sleep. As he slept, the sky filled with the howls of wolves and other awful-sounding beasts, and the air was trembling from swarms of insects taking flight. The moon shone oddly in the sky, and the stars twinkled to a baleful tempo. A curse-laden wind came howling through the boughs and extinguished his fire. Coldness set in, coating the whole place in evil.
The Spirit of the Forest appeared in his dream, saying: "Child, look around you: Heaven and Earth are manifesting their grave displeasure, for you have sinned." Tengir replied: "Pray tell me, Spirit, what sin I have committed." To which the Spirit: "You have fashioned with your own two hands a boundary, but the fashioning of boundaries is the prerogative of the Heavenly spirits of Law. You have stepped beyond your station, and as a consequence the creatures in my forest are suffering." Tengir said: "Is that really why the wind picks up and howls so? Then I shall do whatever penance I must. Pray tell me what I must do." The Spirit said: "You must do two things. First, you must make a sacrifice to Heaven to consecrate the boundary. Second, you must wash yourself in the stream, to cleanse yourself of your sins and let them float away." Heeding the words of the Spirit of the Forest, Tengir woke up, and it was morning.
As soon as his wits were about him, he gathered dirt to make a rudimentary altar. Then using a net he captured a boar and slaughtered it on the dirt altar. While doing so, he prayed aloud to the spirits of Heaven that his boundary might be consecrated, and so it was done. After that, he found that he was covered in the blood of the boar, so he went straightaway to the stream, took off his clothes and bathed in the glistening water. He cupped his hands to pour the water over his head, letting it flow over every inch of his body. The dirt, sweat and blood that was on his body was swept into the stream, where it floated away, never to return. And so he was purified.
When he had done so, he returned to the House-Field. Right away he flattened the altar. He took eight of the trees he had just felled and stripped away all the bark, branches and leaves, till they were made into fine lumber posts, each about twelve feet tall. He set them up at intervals of five feet in a square, such that each side was three posts long. Doing the same with the other trees, he formed horizontal beams which he set atop the vertical ones. Thinner beams were pitched in the middle to form the outline of a gabble. Then he sewed together the pelts of the game he had killed into large sheets, which he fastened to the vertical posts to form walls. And with the grasses he had mowed, he created thatch to fill in the roof. The house had one door which faced south, and two small holes for windows. Over time the felt walls were replaced with ones of wooden boards, girdled by a sturdy base of masonry, while the roof was fitted out with clay tiles. The Spirit of the Forest had, after all, further taught him how to cook clay. Hence not only did he have clay to cover his home, but had clay vessels of varied shapes and sizes to hold all manners of things solid and liquid.