Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/90

 mason] ABORIGINAL AMERICAN ZOO TECH NY 7 1

attached to its body. In this case the hunting animal is really a living capture device (second method).

Insensibly, animals in contact with savage tribes enter into the thinking of these tribes. Not only are the people modified be- cause of the existence of the helpfulness of these animals, but the animals themselves become modified and helpful to the people or suspicious of them ; their whole conduct is changed.

A story is told of a traveler in the Andes, in company with an Indian guide, being informed of the existence of animals of prey actually engaged in devouring a victim simply by the flight of birds overhead. Examples of this unconscious intercommunica- tion and helpfulness are innumerable.

The one animal that has been most helpful to man on the western continent, in the matter of hunting, is the dog, especially in the Arctic regions.

EIGHTH METHOD OF CAPTURE

The eighth method of taking animals is by means of fire through its phases of heat, light, and smoke. The light of the torch serves a double purpose, it illuminates the area of hunting and confuses or attracts the game.

The Seneka are said to have hunted deer at night in canoes, having a wax candle fastened to the bow. The Indians of Puget sound also used a torch to hunt elk, deer, and waterfowl at night. In the case of the latter they erected tall poles to which nets were stretched; when they held their torches behind the nets the migrating birds would fly against it and fall to the ground. The California Indians, as well as the eastern Indians, fished by torch- light.

Squier describes fishing on the Mosquito coast by torchlight made of bundles of fat pine fastened to the top of a long pole. Indeed, the tropical tribes, especially in the Antilles, were accus- tomed to use torches in fishing with dip-nets in the rivers at night. It is said that the Indians of Chesapeake bay formerly would light

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