Page:Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society V.djvu/244

214 pollen is sprinkled on the cigarette, it is sprinkled from butt to tip. When moist pollen is daubed on the side of the cigarette, it is daubed from butt to tip. (From "A Study in Butts and Tips.")319 The hollow internode of the reed only is used. The part containing the solid node is discarded and is split up; so that when thrown away the gods may not mistake it for a true cigarette and suffer disappointment. All the debris of manufacture is carefully collected and deposited to the north of the medicine-lodge. The tobacco of commerce must not be employed. A plug of feathers, referred to above, is shoved into the tube from tip to butt (with an owl's feather) to keep the tobacco from falling out at the butt. The moistened pollen keeps the tobacco in at the tip end. The rules for measuring kethawns are very elaborate. One or more finger-joints; the span; the width of the outstretched hand, from tip of thumb to tip of little finger; the width of three finger-tips or of four finger-tips joined,—are a few of the measurements. Each kethawn has its established size. This system of sacrifice is common among the pueblo tribes of the Southwest, and traces of it have been found elsewhere. Fig. 23 represents a thing called ketán yaltí, or talking kethawn (described in " The Mountain Chant,"314 p. 452), consisting of a male stick painted black and a female stick painted blue. Fig. 24 shows a kethawn used in the ceremony of the night chant; a dozen such are made for one occasion, but male and female are not distinguished. Fig. 25 depicts a set of fifty-two kethawns, used also in the night chant: of these the four in the centre are cigarettes lying on meal; the forty-eight surrounding the meal are sticks of wood. Those in the east are made of mountain mahogany, those in the south of Forestiera neo-mexicana, those in the west of juniper, and those in the north of cherry. A more elaborate description of them must be reserved for a future work.

13. "Sacred buckskin" is a term employed by the author, for convenience, to designate those deerskins specially prepared for use in making masks and for other purposes in the Navaho rites. The following are some of the particulars concerning their preparation; perhaps there are others which the author has not learned: The deer which is to furnish the skin must not be shot, or otherwise wounded. It is surrounded by men on foot or horseback, and caused to run around until it falls exhausted; then a bag containing pollen is put over its mouth and nostrils, and held there till the deer is smothered. The dead animal is laid on its back. Lines are marked with pollen, from the centre outwards along the median line of the body and the insides of the limbs. Incisions are made with a stone knife along the pollen lines, from within outwards, until the skin is opened; the flaying may then be completed with a steel knife. When the skin is removed it is laid to the east of the carcass, head to the east, and hairy side down. The fibulas and ulnae are cut out and put in the skin in the places where they belong,—i.e., each ulna in the skin of its appropriate fore-leg, each fibula in the skin of its appropriate hind-leg. The hide may then be rolled up and carried off. Both ulnae are used as scrapers of the skin. If masks are to be made of the skin, the fibulae are used as awls,—the right fibula in sewing the right sides of the masks, the left fibula in sewing the left sides of the masks. Other rules (very numerous) for making the masks will not be mentioned in this place. Fibulae and ulnae other than those belonging to the deer that furnished the skin must not be used on the latter.

14. This mask, made of leaves of Yucca baccata, from which the thick dorsal portions have been torn away, is used in the rite of the night chant. The observances connected with the culling of the leaves, the manufacture of the mask, and the destruction of the same after use, are too numerous to be detailed here. The author never succeeded in getting such a mask to keep (the obligation on the shaman to tear it up when it has served its purpose seemed imperative), but he