432 THE POINT BARKOW ESKIMO. 



ently a ghost), sometimes as largo as a man and sometimes dwarfish, 

 sometimes a tleshless skeleton, while one man, to describe him, made 

 the same grimace that a white man would use to indicate a hobgoblin, 

 with staring eyes, gaping mouth, and hands outstretched like claws. 

 Apparently &quot;tuuiia&quot; in conversation with us was used to designate all 

 the various supernatural objects of their belief, ghosts as well as 

 familiar spirits. For instance, in Greenland, according to Rink, 1 a 

 ghost &quot;manifests himself by whistling or singing in the ears.&quot; Now, 

 Lieut. Ray was walking rapidly one day in the winter with an Eskimo 

 and his wife, and the woman suddenly stopped and said she &quot;heard 

 tiiBiia&quot; that he made a noise like Hinging in the ears. 



The people generally have a great dread of &quot;tuefia,&quot; who they say 

 would kill them, and are very averse to going out alone in the dark. 

 One of each party that came over from the village in the evening usu 

 ally carried a drawn knife, preferably one of the large double-edged 

 knives, supposed to be Siberian and already described, in his hand as 

 defense against tut:Fia, and a drawn knife was sometimes even carried 

 in the daylight &quot;nanumunlu tuunamunlu,&quot; for bear and demon.&quot; Not 

 withstanding their apparently genuine dread of &quot;tmjfia,&quot; they are by no 

 means averse to talking or even joking about him. 



The knife also serves as a protection against the aurora, which most 

 of them agree is bad, and when bright likely to kill a person by strik 

 ing him in the back of the neck. However, brandishing the knife at 

 it will keep it off. Besides, as a woman told me one night, you can 

 drive off a &quot;bad&quot; aurora by throwing at it dog s excrement and urine. 2 



Lieut. Ray saw in one of the houses in Utkaiwifi, a contrivance for 

 frightening away a &quot;tuena&quot; from the entrance to a house should he try 

 to get in. The man had hung in the trapdoor the handle of a seal-drag 

 by means of a thong spiked to the wall with a large knife, and told Lieut. 

 Ray that if &quot;tiiBfia&quot; tried to get into the house he would undoubtedly 

 catch hold of the handle to help himself up, which would pull down the 

 knife upon his head and frighten him off. We never had an opportu 

 nity of witnessing the ceremony of summoning &quot;tunna,&quot; nor did we ever 

 hear of the ceremony taking place during our stay at the station, but 

 we were fortunate enough to observe several other performances, though 

 they do not appear to be frequent. The ceremony of healing the sick 

 and the, ceremonies connected with the whale-fishery have already been 

 described. 



On the -1st of February, 1883, Lieut. Ray and Gapt. Herendeen hap 

 pened to be at the village on time to see the tuttfia, who had been 

 causing the bad weather, expelled from the village. Some of the natives 

 said the next day that they had killed the tnitiia, but they said at the 

 same time he had gone &quot;along way off.&quot; When Lieut. Ray reached 



1 Tales, etc.. p. 14. 



2 Coinpare Kink (Tales, etc. p. 56) : &quot;Several fetid and stinking matters, such as iilil urine, are excel 

 lent means for keeping away all kinds of evil-iutentioned spirits and ghosts.&quot; 



