Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/677

Rh —wound and rewound until he appeared an improvised mummy—employing knots and turns innumerable, such as had been suggested by naval experience; and he passed from my hands only to be lifted into a small tent or "medicine-lodge" erected for the purpose in the midst of an open prairie, which was devoid of all furnishings save a rattle and drum suspended from the interlocking poles at the apex. Scarcely was he concealed from view, however, when both instruments began a low accompaniment to a chant he sang, and the air all about became vocal with a multitude of noises and sounds, some high overhead, some apparently far away, and others in the grass at our feet; and these sounds were not heard singly and in succession, but altogether in one chorus: bisons bellowed, bears growled, wolves howled, wapiti stags roared, frogs croaked, deer stamped and whistled, horses neighed and galloped, dogs and foxes barked, serpents rattled and hissed, squirrels and hares squealed and rustled, the cat tribe spat and swore, and even wild-fowl flapped their wings and uttered their accustomed cries—a feat of ventriloquism, if ventriloquism it was, and I can assign no other cause, unparalleled in all my experience. When the uproar subsided, Wa-ah-poos appeared at the entrance of the tent unbound; but the thongs, for which most thorough and diligent search was made, were missing. Calling to him an Iroquois, an utter stranger to all but myself, who had arrived but the day before from beyond the Great Lakes in the province of Ontario, he directed him to a certain tree he pointed out growing on a bluff more than a mile away, bidding him bring what would there be found suspended from a designated branch. The latter, much to the general amazement, returned with the bonds apparently intact; and were I not assured of the impossibility of transporting them to that distance, I should have had no hesitancy in making affidavit that they were those with which the conjurer had been bound, so exactly did every turn and knot appear to be my very own.

A few days later, the same wizard, while conjuring a squaw in the final stage of phthisis (consumption), suddenly thrust his hands beneath the blanket that covered her emaciated form, and dragged forth the carcass of a full-grown gray wolf, which he flung outside into the midst of assembled relatives and friends, by whom it was quickly pounded and trampled into an almost unrecognizable pulp. "The Rabbit" now announced the recovery of the woman as assured. In making this assertion, however, he was "a trifle out," since she died the same night! I had warned him of the probable result, but he responded that it "mattered little." It evidently was not his first experience of the kind, and he found ready excuse in another spirit, a near relative of the first, who had returned unexpectedly from a long journey, and whose presence consequently could not have been foreseen, who took advantage of his (Wa-ah-poo's) temporary absence to work its foul purpose!