BOURKE. ] THE MEDICINE HAT. 581 
Nan-ta-do-tash explained that the characters on the medicine hat 
meant: A, clouds; B, rainbow; ©, hail; E, morning star; F', the God of 
Wind, with his lungs; G, the black “kan”; H, great stars or suns. 
“Kan” is the name given to their principal gods. The appearance 
of the kan himself and of the tail of the hat suggest the centipede, an 
important animal god of the Apache. The old man said that the figures 
represented the powers to which he appealed for aid in his ‘‘medicine” 
and the kan upon whom he called for help. There were other doctors 
with other medicines, but he used none but those of which he was going 
to speak to me. 
Fia. 440.—Apache war bonnet. 
When an Apache or other medicine-man is in full regalia he ceases 
to be a man, but becomes, or tries to make his followers believe that he 
has become, the power he represents. I once heard this asserted in a 
very striking way while I was with a party of Apache young men who 
had led me to one of the sacred caves of their people, in which we came 
across a great quantity of ritualistic paraphernalia of all sorts. 
“We used to stand down here,” they said, ‘‘and look up to the tup 
of the mountain and see the kan come down.” This is precisely what 
the people living farther to the south told the early Spanish missiona- 
ries. 
