LEOPARD MEtf — HUTTON. 537 



and more likely candidate to this rather doubtful honor. This was 

 an Ao named Imtong-lippa of Changki. While this beat was going 

 on three miles away, he was behaving like a lunatic in the house 

 of one of the hospital servants at Mokokchung. During his posses- 

 sion he identified himself with one of the tigers being hunted and 

 stated that one of them was wounded and speared; that he himself 

 was hit with a stick (the Ao method of beating entailed the throwing 

 of sticks and stones and abuse incessantly to make the tiger come 

 out) . He laid a rolled mat to represent a fence and six times leapt 

 across it. He ate ginger and drank a whole bamboo "chunga" 

 (about a bucketful) of water, after which he said that he had es- 

 caped with two other tigers after crossing a stream, and was hiding 

 in a hole, but that one tigress, a trans-frontier woman, had been 

 speared in the side (in point of fact she was speared in the neck) 

 and had been left behind and would die. (We shot the tigress in the 

 end.) He said there were four tigers surrounded. Chekiye said six. 

 Four actually were seen, however, two grown and two half- or three- 

 quarters grown. There may have been others, but it is not very 

 likely. Some sixteen cattle had been killed in two days. This ac- 

 count I took down after returning from the beat, on the same day, 

 from an eyewitness of Imtong-lippa's exhibition, which was seen and 

 watched by a large number of men both reliable and otherwise in 

 their accounts of it. 



I have given these details as they show clearly the Naga beliefs 

 on the subject. Of course among the Semas the idea of what one 

 might describe as the projectability of the soul is very pronounced. 

 It is a common thing for a sick person to ascribe his sickness to the 

 absence of his soul from his body, and under such circumstances he 

 takes food and drink and goes to the field or any other places where 

 he thinks his soul has got left behind and summons it, calling it, of 

 course, by his own name. When it has arrived he comes slowly 

 home, bringing his soul behind him. A case once came up before 

 me for adjudication in which an old man named Nikiye, who had 

 been ill for some time, went to the fields to call his soul. It came, 

 and he was climbing slowly back to the village occasionally calling 

 " Nikiye, Nikiye !" over his shoulder to make sure that the truant 

 soul was following. Unfortunately a personal enemy had observed 

 him, and lay in wait in the bush by the path with a thick stick. As 

 the old man tottered by he sprang from his ambush with a yell, and 

 brought down his stick with a thud on the path immediately behind 

 Nikiye's heels. The frightened soul fled incontinently, and the old 

 fellow himself died of the loss of it two days later. To avoid losing 

 the soul a Sema, who makes a temporary shelter away from home, 



