NELSON] BLADDER FESTIVAL 391 
the hunters had treated them badly and had not offered them sufficient 
food. He added that the shades of the bladders swam faster this year 
than the year before, making it more difficult to overtake them. 
During this account the names of the hunters were mentioned and 
the shaman represented the bladder shades as criticising very harshly 
the prominent faults of some of them, which seemed to chagrin the 
victims of this criticism considerably. After this was ended two 
buckets of water were placed in front of the exit hole in the floor and 
a man lay down on each side of it. At midnight everyone in the’ 
kashim arose and stripped to the skin, the floor was removed, and a great 
fire made mm the pit. When the wood burned down, leaving a bed of 
glowing coals, the heat became intense, so that the men were ina 
scorching atmosphere with the perspiration rolling down their bodies. 
While in this condition all bathed in urine, which had been retained in 
the wooden buckets. This was said to render them clean from any evil 
influence that might follow from the recent presence of the shades in their 
midst, and ended the observances cornected with the festival. Until 
this bath had been taken no one was permitted to leave the kashim, nor 
during the course of the festival was anyone permitted to hunt or fish. 
At this village there were two kashims side by side, half of the vil- 
lage belonging to each. During the time that the feast just described 
was being observed in one of these houses a similar festival was going 
on in the other. I was unable to learn anything about the ceremonies 
conducted there, as my attention was fully occupied in the one where I 
stopped, but a hasty visit showed that the arrangement of the interior 
was exactly the same as in the one described, except that in place of a 
gull’s image suspended in the middle of the roof there was a rude 
wooden image of a man wrapped in the skin of an eider duck. 
IT was informed here that the bladders were kept in the kashim for 
seventeen days, with a different set of ceremonies for each day. 
Two days after leaving Kushunuk, at the end of the festival, I 
arrived at the large village of Kaialigamut, situated in the same dis- 
trict, and learned that the bladders had on that morning been put into 
a small lake near by. In front of the kashim stood a row of four kaiak 
paddles, their blades planted in the snow, showing that at least some 
of the observances here were identical with those at Kushunuk. 
When I entered the kashim and began to stamp the snow from my 
feet a chorus of eider-duck sounds was raised by the men, showing 
that a loud noise was tabooed here also. On noticing this I at once 
ceased and went to one side of the room to sit down, when one of the 
old men came over and brushed the snow from my fur clothing, at the 
same time pointing to an inflated sealskin that hung over my head, 
and asked me to change to another part of the room. 
These people seemed much more strict in their observances than those 
at Kushunuk, to judge by the excessive caution used to avoid making 
