K'MtTKAMTCH. Ixxxi 



daughter is not given, but she represents the clouded or mottled evening 

 sky. When she leads him to the under-world they meet there a vast crowd 

 of spirits, who for five nights dance in a large circle around a fire, and on 

 each of the intervening days are changed into dry bones. K'mukamtch 

 takes with him some of these in a bag, and when reaching the horizon at 

 daybreak throws the bones around the world in pans and creates tribes 

 from them, the Modoc tribe being the last of these. Then he travels in the 

 path of the sun till he reaches the zenith, builds his lodge, and lives there 

 now with his daughter. 



K'mukamtch also figui-es as the culture-hero of his people ; but since 

 he does so only in one of the myths wliich came to our knowledge, this 

 myth may be borrowed from some neighboring tribe. In that myth the 

 primitive arts and practices, as hunting and bow-and-arrow making, are 

 taught by him to men, as was done also by Quetzalcoatl, by Botchika, and 

 in Oregon by the Flint-Boy of the Kalapuyas, in whom the sun's rays were 

 personified. 



What the national myths relate of him is not of a nature to make 

 him an object of divine veneration. He resembles men in every particular, 

 is born and dies, acts like other Indians, travels about with companions, 

 starts on gambling jaunts, is indigent and often in want, and experiences 

 more misery throughout his eventful career than Zeus ever did on account 

 of his illicit love-making. Like the chief gods of other Indian nations, he 

 is the great deceiver and trickster for all those that have dealings with him, 

 is attacked and drubbed repeatedly for his meanness and crimes ; but after 

 coming out "second best" or being killed over and over he recuperates 

 and comes to life again just as if nothing had occurred to disturb him. 

 Compared with other fictions representing powers of nature, he is fully the 

 equal of such characters as Nanabozho and Gluskap, or of the Kayowe 

 demiurge Sinti, "the Deceiver." Some of the most attractive fictions de- 

 scribe the various tricks and sti^atagems by which K'mukamtch allures his 

 son Aishish into perilous situations, from which rescue seems impossible. 

 Prompted by him to climb a tall pine-tree, he would have perished on it 

 by hunger had not his charitable wives, the butterflies, succored him in 

 time. The general conflagration by which the earth and its inhabitants 

 vi 



