How Raven Escaped
Utnapishtim ("he who saw life") was a wise king of Shurrupak (on the banks of the Euphrates). He appears in the epic of Gilgamesh as one of the two human survivors of Enlil's great flood (much like, you know, God's flood, though only a few millennium earlier in the literature). Having been granted immortality after the flood, Utnapishtim was living on the island of Dilmun where Gilgamesh found him during his search for immortality.
Utnapishtim, secretly alerted to Enlil's plan by Ea, the water god, got his wife and "two of every animal" into a boat and rode out Enlil's wrath. When the flood receeded, he sent out birds to search for land. First he sent out a dove, which came back. Then he sent out a swallow, which came back. Then he sent out a raven.
Which never came back.