108 TRANSACTIONS OF THR CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VoL. lY. 



The skulls of the bears whose flesh has been eaten up are even to-day 

 invariably stuck up a stick or the broken branch of a tree. But the 

 aborigines fail to give any reason for this practice. 



If the Carrier was to use traps instead of snares, the observances pre- 

 parator}-- to setting them varied somewhat. When martens were the 

 intended game, the period of abstinence from sexual intercourse was 

 shortened to ten days or thereabouts, during which the trapper slept by 

 the iireside pressing down a little stick over his neck. This, of course, 

 could not fail to cause the fall-stick of his traps to drop on the neck of 

 the coveted game ! The chewing and squirting up of the heracleum root 

 were observed in this as in the former case. The deprecatory formula 

 was merely changed into Nyilskuh ! may I entrap you ' 



When successful, the trapper had to be very careful that no dog touches 

 his prey, which, to avert such a misfortune, he had to hang up a peg in 

 the lodge as soon as this was practicable. Contact with a dog would 

 certainly indispose the game's fellow martens against the traps of the 

 hunter responsible for such a slight. 



No superstitious practice appears to have been followed as a prepara- 

 tion to beaver hunting, save that to ensure a larger catch, one-half of each 

 trap was daubed with red ochre. But nobody who does not care to con- 

 demn himself to useless efports at securing any further supply of the game 

 must be unguarded enough to swallow the little patella bone of the 

 beaver. In like manner, if after having captured a beaver, a Carrier has 

 the carelessness to let one of his dogs get at that bone, he may as well 

 resign himself to return home empty handed. During the whole beaver- 

 trapping season, his first capture will infallibly be his last. 



Lynx not only was not eaten by the women, but even when once 

 snared, it could not be brought in the lodge through the doorway. 

 Women as well as men daily enter through that passage, and the former 

 must have no intercourse, however indirect, with the feline. So it was 

 introduced by men into the lodge through the smoke hole in the roof 

 It was touched by men only, its flesh boiled by men and eaten by men. 

 The reason of the aversion of the women for the lynx will appear from 

 the following legend : — 



" A young couple of Indians was living in the woods. One morning, 

 as the husband was absent chasing large animals, a stranger of surprising 

 beauty and apparently endowed with superhuman powers came upon the 

 young woman. " Follow me : you shall be my wife," he said to her. 

 But as she was very much attached to her husband, she strove hard not to 

 hearken to him. Yet such were the stranger's charms and hidden powers 



