Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 4.djvu/209

Rh annoyed, and banished them to Southern India. The elder she ordered to live by carrying goods about the country on pack-bullocks, and the younger to catch birds by means of two snares, which she obligingly formed from hair plucked from under her arm. Consequently the Vagirivalas never shave that portion of the body. The Kuruvikkārans are nomadic, and keep pack-bullocks, which convey their huts and domestic utensils from place to place. Some earn their living by collecting firewood, and others by acting as watchmen in fields and gardens. Women and children go about the streets begging, and singing songs, which are very popular, and imitated by Hindu women. They further earn a livelihood by hawking needles and glass beads, which they may be seen in the evening purchasing from Kayalans (Muhammadan merchants) in the Madras bazar. One of the occupations of the Kuruvikkārans is the manufacture and sale of spurious jackal horns, known as narikompu. To catch the jackals, they make an enclosure of a net, inside which a man seats himself, armed with a big stick. He then proceeds to execute a perfect imitation of the jackal's cry, on hearing which the jackals come running to see what is the matter, and are beaten down. A Kuruvikkāran, whom the Rev. E. Loventhal interviewed, howled like a jackal, to show his skill as a mimic. The cry was quite perfect, and no jackal would have doubted that he belonged to their class. Sometimes the entire jackal's head is sold, skin and all. The process of manufacture of the horn is as follows. After the brain has been removed, the skin is stripped off a limited area of the skull, and the bone at the place of junction of the sagittal and lambdoid sutures