344. THER NISHINAM. 
asked him to cover them up with pitch. The lizard took pitch and rubbed 
it on so thick he could see nothing, which got the bat into a bad scrape. 
He hopped, jumped, and fluttered; he flew this way, he flew that way; he 
burnt his head, he burnt his tail. Then he flew toward the west and cried 
out loud, ‘Mo-nuw', shu-le'-u-lu!” (“Blow, O wind!”) The wind heard 
him and blew in his eyes, but he could not blow off all the pitch, and that 
is the reason the bat sees so ill to this day. And because he was in the 
fire, that is the reason he is so black and singed-looking. 
THE OLD MAN-EATER. 
Long, long ago there lived an old man and his wife who made it their 
especial business to kill and eat Indians. They had their wigwam thirty 
or forty miles down on the Sacramento Plains, and the ground all around 
it was covered a foot deep with blood. They made stone mortars, carved 
and polished inside and out, much better than the mortars the women use 
nowadays to pound acorns in; and in these mortars they pounded up their 
victims, and made them into hash (as the Indians express it), so that they 
might be tender to eat. The Indians warred for their lives against this ter- 
rible old man and his wife, but they could do nothing against them, and 
were disappearing from the earth. Then at last the Old Coyote took pity 
on his offspring, the people whom he had made, and he determined to kill 
this old man. It was his habit to go into the dance-house when it was full 
of Indians, the chiefs and the great men of the tribe, and of these he would 
catch and kill the fattest and the juiciest for himself. So the coyote dug a 
great hole outside of the dance-house, close beside the door, and hid him- 
self in it with a mighty big knife, and covered himself up so that the old 
man could see nothing but the point of the knife. As he passed into the 
dance-house he saw the point of the knife and kicked at it, but went on in. 
Then the coyote leaped out of the hole, rushed in after him, caught the old 
man, and slew him. 
This legend is very interesting, on aecount of the probable reference 
to a supposed pre-aboriginal race, who were the makers of the superior 
stone mortars occasionally found in many places in California, and of which 
the Indians universally acknowledge that they were not the authors. 
