144 THE TATU. 
especially the great white owl, are devils, and their feathers are worn as a 
propitiation, 
This dance is performed in the evening, soon after the acorns are ripe, 
outdoors, and within a cirele of fires. .A chorister beats time on his 
hand with a split stick, and sometimes a trumpeter blows a monotonous 
blast on a whistle fashioned from the leg-bone of some animal. At the 
proper time the chief delivers an oration, of which the one great burden is 
an exhortation to the squaws to lead virtuous and industrious lives. 
Transmigration of souls is an article of their credo; that is, they 
believe that bad Indians’ spirits take up their abode in various animals, 
especially the screech-owl and the coyote, while the souls of the good are 
wafted up to heaven in the smoke of the funeral pyre. To one who has 
ever heard the eldritch and blood-curdling midnight gibbering of the screech- 
owl, it is little wonder that the California Indians so generally assign to him 
the souls of the ungodly dead,.or even those of the hobgoblins ; but inas- 
much as the coyote was the original of the human kind, it is something 
exceptional that he should afterward become the embodiment of the wicked 
only. Herein is a crude idea of Italic progression: firsi, coyote; second, 
man; third, the good become beatific in heaven, and the bad return to 
coyotes. 
Thunder, according to the Tatu, is caused by the flight of some Indian’s 
many-winged spirit up to heaven, flapping its pinions loudly as it ascends. 
Snakes are an object of superstitious belief and of unfeigned terror, 
inasmuch as they consider them to be vivified by the souls of the impious 
dead, dispatched as special emissaries of the devil to work them evil. They 
have a legend of one that lived on Mill Creek, which was a hundred feet 
long, with a single horn on its forehead, and which it required over a 
hundred Indians to destroy. Another one they tell of was so long that 
it reached around a mountain, bit its own tail, and died, and whosoever 
crosses the line of its bones to this day straightway gives up the ghost. 
They also relate a legend of the coyote which is something different 
from that of the Pomo. 
LEGEND OF THE COYOTE. 
Many hundred snows ago while mankind were yet in the form and 
