INDIAN MEDICINE. 659 



ioned wound and rewound until he appeared an improvised mummy 

 employing knots and turns innumerable, such as had been sug- 

 gested by na\al 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 in- 

 struments 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, re- 

 turned 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 ap- 

 pear 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 fore- 

 seen, who took advantage of his ( Wa-ah-poos ) s) temporary absence to 

 work its foul purpose ! 



