Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/492

436 can be avoided, and never when the reptile has entered within the camp.

On three separate occasions the writer has been asked to kill snakes, discovered near the fires of the Apache scouts, who probably thought that any chastisement to follow would fall on his shoulders alone. Inquiry developed no facts beyond those above stated, and the existence of a half-understood connection between the snakes and the "old men" or "dead men" of the tribe. On the last occasion the snake was killed outside the camp, but much to the disgust of a "medicine-man" who happened to come along shortly after the execution. When the trail of a snake is found to have crossed the path of a war-party the omen is looked upon as unfortunate. The march must stop until the "medicine-men", going to the front, rub out the snake-mark with their feet, using appropriate prayers and sacrifices.

Any Apache upon meeting a snake (especially the crotalus, so common in Orizona and Sonora) throws upon its trail a pinch of Hoddentin, and addresses it as follows:

The meaning being: "Be good, O! Snake! Be good, Get away from here! Go not here where children and women go. Stay in your cave (or hole). Don't go about here."

k in italics is an exploded consonant.

When a "medicine-man" is present it is his office to recite the supplication.

Not only is there some connection, in the mind of the Apache, between the veneration he pays the snake and that which he accords to the manes of his ancestors, but