swANTONl COSMOLOGY 457 



ing it came to him by canoe in the shape of a small man and wrestled 

 with him. The land-otter man threw the youth down twice, Imt he 

 also threw the land-otter man once. At last it left. 



As among the Haida, belief in these beings is deeply rooted, and per- 

 sons are easily deceived by practical jokers who imitjite the sounds and 

 actions attributed to land-otter men. 



To obtain good luck people used sometimes to carve round sticks into 

 the shape of land otters and place them in the cave where a shaman's 

 body had been laid, saying to them, '"Keep me in good health. Help me 

 wherever I go." 



The frog was talked to, and if anyone went by a point between Sitka 

 and a camping place called Daxe't where one of these animals had 

 turned into a rock, he asked it to help him. The slime exuding from 

 a frog's skin was thought to be very poisonous and fatal to smaller 

 creatures. 



Sea lions were hunted, but they were much respected on account of 

 their size and strength and in several stories appear as powerful 

 helpers. The lai-gest sea lions were called by a special name, qlatlA- 

 cuka'wu ("biggcst-animal-sitting-on-the-edge-of-an-island"). 



The seal was not an oljject of nuich reverence, but a man of the 

 Tsague'di family is said to have been once captured by seals, and after- 

 wards to have related various things about them. He said that the seals 

 ar(> very much afraid of killer whales, and when the latti-r approach 

 the whole ocean seems to squeak "like dry boards." Their terror of 

 killer whales is due to the fact that the whales destroy everything 

 when they kill seals, whereas men save their stomachs, and it is in 

 the seal's stomach that his soul resides. After the stomach of a seal 

 is blown out to dry the seal spirit comes out and the seal is born again. 

 From this man, according to Katishan, the Tsague'di claim the seal, 

 but, strangely enough, a man belonging to that family was entirely 

 ignorant of the story. The story itself is doubtless genuinely Tlingit, 

 whether it is properly attributed to this clan or not. 



The writer was told at Sitka that anciently people used to talk to a 

 piece of bone that comes out of a seal's shoulder blade, saying, "'Will 

 you tell me what I am going to kiWi Am I going to kill a seal or a 

 Ijcar f Then the speaker spit upon it and threw it up into the air. If 

 it remained in a certain position after it fell the man would kill some- 

 thing; otherwise he might as well stay at liome. 



The killer whale was regarded highly, t)ut reverence for it did not 

 amount to a killer-whale cult, as might almost be said of the Haida. 

 When a killer whale was passing people threw their children into the 

 wash raised by it and said, "1 want to be very strong and healthy. 

 Give me things." 



The killer whales are said always to have paid attention to human 

 beings because they were never hunted, and they were never hunted 



