Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 24, 1913.djvu/71

Rh a wicked tribe, and great numbers were killed. Long afterwards, [I am abbreviating considerably], Kemuime returned to the maloka, with her bird-rump covered with hair. The old women rubbed it with milk to remove the unsightliness. But it only grew the faster, so she was covered with leaves. She told them that a kemuime, i.e. a monkey, had seized her and carried her forcibly off to be his woman. She gave birth to twins, and buried the second, as even kemuime have but one at a birth. The child was hairy like a kemuime, with the face of a man. When she suckled him her unsightliness came. So she ran away. The tribe held a tobacco palaver, and because of the pollution, and the blood feud with the wicked tribe, and the girl's unsightliness, they determined to kill her. But she fled back to the forest, and all the kemuime came and robbed the plantation; and the lianas grew like nets, so that no man of the Utiguene could hunt, and the tribe died out."

There are also many myths connected with the discovery and cultivation of manioc, as well as of other fruits, but space forbids more than reference to them or to the numerous fables equivalent to such world-wide tales as the Lion and the Mouse, and the Hare and the Tortoise. In detail the Indian versions differ greatly from the Old World stories, but in every case the principle is identical.

The Indian has a firm belief in omens, but none of these tribes make much use of charms, though men wear bracelets of iguana skin, and children have a ring cut from the polished shell of a nut, put on the arm for lucky magic purposes. Defence lies in observation of tabu, and due heed to what is ruled good or evil; also the study of lucky and unlucky signs. I ought to mention the universal belief among these Indians in the potency of human breath as an evil-expelling agency. Much of the medicine-man's ceremonial healing consists of blowing and breathing over the patient, as well as the usual sucking out of the poison, the evil spirit that, in the guise of stick, stone, thorn, or some similar object, lurks in the flesh of the sufferer and causes