VARIOUS SUPERSTITIOUS BELIEFS. 345 
Other Indians say that these mortars were given to them by the same one 
who gave them the acorns, and that they subsequently learned to fashion 
for themselves the rude mortar-holes on the top of great bowlders, the same 
that they use to-day. 
THE ROAD-WOMAN (BO/-HEM—KUL’-LEH). 
There dwells in the forests and upon the hills a ghost which is both 
man and woman. It is called by the Indians bo'-hem kiil’-leh (from boh, 
bohem, “‘road”, and kiilleh, “woman”). It is a bad ‘spirit, and only bad 
men and women resort to it. Sometimes in the night its strange, wild, 
shrill ery is heard in the forest, and then some one in the camp will answer 
it and go out to meet it. When a woman is about to be overtaken in dis- 
honest childbirth and her pangs are upon her, she goes to and fro in the 
forest crying that this bad spirit overcame her and that she conceived by it; 
also, a man who has wrought an evil thing and been detected in it accuses 
this double-sexed spirit of having tempted him. 
This is one of those strange, subtle Indian superstitions which are 
scarcely intelligible to us. I suspect this spirit must be connected with the 
phenomenon of insanity. It has often been said that there never were any 
cases of insanity among the Indians before they became acquainted with 
the Americans and learned to love strong drink. This statement is doubt- 
ful. Like all people of a low grade of culture, they attribute insanity to 
demoniacal possession. They have a word, hon'-tai, which they apply to 
people who have become infatuated with this ghost, and which undoubtedly 
can only be translated “insane”. 
I have never discovered among the Indians any trace of beings like the 
swan-maidens or were-wolves of medieval legends. They have the words 
“quail-women”, “‘deer-women”, and the like, but that #s their only way of 
expressing the feminine gender. There is a story of a famous shaman 
who, when about to exercise his art in a very difficult case, would turn 
into a bear. They also believe in hermaphrodites, and declare they have 
seen them. — 
Some Nishinam have heard of a Great Being, the white man’s God, 
whom, on the American River, they call Sha; at Placerville, Liish. They 
have the name only, nothing more. 
