304 THE MONTAGNAIS INDIANS AND THEIE FOLK-LOEE 



that she could not resist the impulse to the murder, to 

 which she was compelled by the devil. At a neigh- 

 boring Indian post during the next summer a man 

 killed a woman to prevent her being changed into a 

 "Wendigo (a Windigo) — a man-eater or demon. The 

 same missionary saw the skull and bones of another 

 woman who had been killed for a similar reason. 

 And he declares in his letters that the decrease in the 

 number of these Mistassini Indians is due not only to 

 the lack of provisions and other hardships when game 

 is scarce, but to their gluttony in times of plenty, their 

 gross immorality, and the debilitating effect upon 

 their nerves and temperament of their constant prac- 

 tice of the dark arts of juggling and sorcery. Some 

 of them would appear to be adepts in the art of h3'p- 

 notism, and stories are told by the missionaries of the 

 control exercised by Indian jugglers over young wom- 

 en of their own or other tribes, to bend them to their 

 own purposes. 



Father Arnaud corroborates the tales of occasion- 

 al anthropophagy among the Nascapees, but declares 

 that it is usually hunger, and not a passion for human 

 flesh, that drives them to the fearful habit. Jealousy 

 and resentment have at times led them to shed the 

 blood of those of whom they were the natural guardi- 

 ans, and the missionary relates the story of a hunter, 

 who, being anxious to put away his wife and marry an- 

 other (and having never heard, it is charitable to pre- 

 sume, of the divorce courts of the West), left her to 

 perish alone in the Avoods. The poor creature con- 

 trived, however, to track her husband to his next en- 

 campment, only to be pierced through the heart by an 



