1914] Northwestern Den6s and Northeastern Asiatics 181 



XIII. 



Yet should an ultra-fastidious critic wish for something of a still 

 more exclusively psychological order, I think I am in a position to 

 satisfy him. I am very much mistaken, indeed, if the evidence I am 

 now going to furnish does not carry conviction to the mind of the most 

 prejudiced reader. Indeed, I will confess that it is the little discovery 

 of which I am now going briefly to entertain the reader which put me 

 on the track of the real points of similarity between the aborigines of 

 Am^erica and those of Asia, and suggested the advisability of under- 

 taking the special investigations which have culminated in the present 

 paper. 



In 1895 I published in these very Transactions "Three Carrier 

 Myths", the first of which, called "Pursued by their Mother's Head", 

 relates the fate of an unfaithful woman who was slain by her husband, 

 and whose head then went after her two little children as they were 

 fleeing from the theatre of the tragedy. 



I beg to call the reader's attention to the characteristic details of 

 the latter's flight, and, in order to facilitate comparisons, I must be 

 allowed to reproduce herewith the part of that legend which refers to 

 the hegira of the two little wanderers. Here it is according to my in- 

 formants of twenty years ago, such as our Institute published it at that 

 time: 



"While the two brothers were going on at random, the younger, who 

 was packed by the other,^ saw of a sudden their mother's head coming 

 out after them. Then he said: 'Elder brother, mother's head is pur- 

 suing us'. Whereupon his elder brother threw out behind himself, 

 without turning back, the stone arrow-head which his father had given 

 him. The arrow-head became at once a mountain which, for the while, 

 cut them off from their mother's pursuit. 



"But their mother's head was changed into wind and continued 

 to pursue them. 'Elder brother, mother's head is still after us', said 

 the little one in the swaddling clothes. Thereupon his brother threw 

 behind him, without looking back, the rwoescho thorn handed him by 

 his father. The thorn transpierced the head and set it bleeding, after 

 which it was transformed into a thorny bush. The bush grew to a 

 prodigious height, and for a moment it barred the passage to their 

 mother's head. But the head finally jumped over it and continued to 

 pursue them. 



^ The reader should remember that the Carriers of British Columbia always carry 

 their babes on the back, with their face turned in an opposite direction to that of the 

 packer, and that the child is carried in an upright position. 



