Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/520

 486 Collectanea.

even by contracting itself the earth could not get small enough la suit the sun, and one piece remained outside. This place is called Whedzura. In it there is no sky, and no one ever sees the sur> there. But they have a stick which they hold very precious, and by it they tell the time. The light in Whedzura is like moon- light, and the air is so strong that people get old quickly. They marry off their children one year, and cannot recognise them the next. This place is so far off that if a man wants to go there he must start the moment he is born : if he delays he will grow old on the road and die before he gets there.

VI. Tiger Folklore.

Man, the tiger, and the spirit {terhumd) were brothers, sons of one woman. The man used to attend on his mother and bathe her, but the tiger was always grumbling in the house and giving trouble to everyone. The man used to cook his food, the tiger ate his raw, and the spirit merely had his smoke-dried. At last the mother was tired of these family squabbles and set up a mark made of grass in the jungle. She said : " Whoever touches the mark first shall live in villages, the loser in the jungle." Then the spirit said to the man : " I will shoot over the mark with an arrow, and you can say that you touched it first." So when they had run a little way, the man called out : " I am touching the mark," and just then the spirit shot an arrow and made the mark move. Thus the tiger was deceived and went off to the jungle, where he lives to this day.

After this the man sent the cat to the tiger to say: "At all events you are my brother. Whenever you kill a deer put aside a leg for me." But the cat muddled the message, and said : " When- ever you kill a deer put it aside for the man." The tiger was angry, and since that time men and tigers are at enmity. All the same, they are brothers, and when a man -happens to kill a tiger, he will say in his village: "The gods have killed a tiger in the jungle"; not " I have killed it." If he said he had killed it, all the other tigers would say: "This man has killed his brother," and would try to devour him. What makes the tiger ear men is that when he sees them lifting great stones, which he