Page:String Figures and How to Make Them.djvu/22

Rh Maui fishing up the land. Men, canoes, houses, etc., are also represented. Some state that Maui invented this game." Tregear (1, p. 115; 2, p. 58) calls the game Whai, huhi or maui, and says sometimes a whole drama was played by means of the changing shapes. Two of the favorites were the ascent of Tawhaki, the Lightning God, to heaven and the fishing up of the land by the hero Maui. There were proper songs chanted as accompaniments to the movements of the players' hands. Gill (p. 65) informs us that in the Hervey group "cat's-cradle (Ai)was a great delight of old and young. Teeth were called into play to help the fingers. One complication, in which the cord in the centre is twisted into a long slender stem, and therefore called 'the coco-nut tree,' I have never known a European to unravel."

America. Several authors have recorded the occurrence of cat's-cradle among the Eskimo (Hall, x, p. 316; 2, p. 129). Klutschak (pp. 136–139) found even old men of King William Land playing it with reindeer sinews. They showed him 139 named figures; of these he gives 3 illustrations, Tuktuk (Reindeer), Amau (Wolf), and Kakbik (Pig). Andree very truly points out that there is no pig in this region, but his suggestion that the natives learned the game from Europeans ("Nordmen") is untenable. Tenicheff (p. 153) copies the first two of the figures, but does not say what they are meant to represent nor where he obtained them. As previously mentioned, Boas (1, p. 229) has published a few figures, and elsewhere (4, pp. 151, 161) he gives the observations of Capt. G. Comer that in Iglulik, "While the sun is going south in the fall, the game of cat's-cradle is played, to catch the sun in the meshes of the string, and to prevent his disappearance" (p. 151). Also on the west coast of Hudson Bay, "boys must not play cat's-cradle, because in later life their fingers might become entangled in the harpoon-line. They are allowed to play this game when they become adults. Two cases were told of hunters who lost their fingers, in which the cause was believed to be their having played cat's-cradle when young. Such youths are thought to be particularly liable to lose their fingers in hunting ground-seal" (p. 161).

According to Murdoch (p. 383), "the [Point Barrow] women are very fond of playing cat's-cradle whenever they have leisure. One favorite figure is a very clever representation of a reindeer, which is made, by moving the fingers, to run down-hill from one hand to the other." Nelson (p. 332) was amused for an hour or more by an old man at Cape Darby, near Behring Strait, who "made a constant succession of patterns with his sinew cord, forming outlines of various birds and other animals of the region."