Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/68

56 and gives rise to floods. Omnivorous eater though he be, no Indian would kill the great water-snake, nor the jaguar, for food. When a child is killed by a tiger, or is lost in the bush, (taken by the tiger in Indian opinion), a tribal hunt would be organised, and the tiger-folk dealt with as human enemies would be; for they, like humans, can institute a blood feud with their enemies. The brute, if killed, would be brought back to the maloka and a feast of revenge, similar in detail to the anthropophagous orgies, would follow. Every medicine-man possesses a tiger skin in which he keeps his magic. It is never used as a covering, but the wizard is supposed to assume it when he goes forth in tiger form to work against tribal enemies.

In a sense any animal, all nature in fact, is inimical to the Indian. He is set in an overpowering environment. Isolated, without spur to material or intellectual progress, his surroundings assume a fearsome significance. It needs not much incentive to imagination to people the dark places of the sombre, illimitable forest with legions of threatening devils. Somewhere, above the sky which is the roof of the world, is an infinitely remote, intangible Beneficence, a Great Good Spirit, who is good for the sole reason that he is not evil. This is Neva, already mentioned as the Great Spirit who once visited earth in the guise of a man, and spoke to the Indians. The tale was told me by a Boro, but is practically the same among all these groups. But, runs the myth, one Indian displeased the Good Spirit, who thereupon told the tiger-people to be wicked, and kill the Indians who had heretofore been their brothers. Then the Good Spirit went back to his happy hunting-grounds, and was seen no more by men. Moreover, he is entirely passive. The Bad Spirit, whose kingdom lies below, is on the contrary possessed of an exceeding activity. His energies are ceaseless, and all malevolent. Both these Powers have subordinate spirits respectively good and evil. No prayer is offered to the Good, no supplication made to the Bad