Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/93

 74 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899

making and of condensed food for long journeys took place. Here belong decoys, ice-creepers, and snowshoes.

In Drake's The World Encompassed there is a very vivid de- scription of a rhea hunter who " carries a great and large plume of feathers on a staffe, in the forepart bearing a likeness of the head, and necke, and bulke of an ostrich."

The seal hunter draws his hood over his head, lies down on the ice, and approaches the victim by stealth, taking advantage of its forty winks.

Before the intrusion of the gun there is no doubt that wariness, sound and sight decoys, and disguises of all kinds were in universal use in the western hemisphere. The author has collected a large number of these appeals to the eyes and ears of the game in order to get within reach of the dispatching weapon.

DOMESTICATION

The domestication of animals is not, strictly speaking, a mode of capture, and yet, when the processes by which wild creatures are brought under the domination of man are understood, it will be found that it is a slow and insidious method of capture. In fact, all vermin and other noxious creatures are self-domesticated. The ox, horse, ass, camel, sheep, goat, and hog came to man slowly and in droves. On the western hemisphere they antedated man, existing now as fossils or poorly allied species. Few of these congeners were domesticable. Professor McGee has drawn atten- tion to the subtle manner in which the animals in our southwest- ern regions have come into diplomatic relations and compromises with the Seri and Papago Indians.

The dog in both Americas, the peccary and the llama in South America, for pets, for hunting, for packing, for travois, or for trac- tion, were the farthest advanced in the school of domestication among the animals of the western hemisphere ; but every tribe had, in addition to these, birds and beasts which responded to some desire of the adults or children or have come under their

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