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Kneeling beside my brother he sucked violently with this short tube against the skin 
between the shoulders. Suddenly he vomited both tubes into a basin of clean water 
my mother had set beside him, ‘ Look,’ he exclaimed, as he held up the bowl and 
carried it round for us to examine. Floating on the water with the bones was some- 
thing that looked like a tiny feather about half an inch long, at one end of which was 
a minute black speck. ‘That black speck/ the medicine-man said, ‘would grow and 
grow inside the boy’s body until it killed him.’ He removed his tubes and drank all 
the water, swallowing the feather with it. My brother recovered very quickly. Not 
long afterwards this same kusabindugeyu healed another sick man by sucking out of 
his body, with the longer of his two tubes, a quantity of yellow -bile” (James Walker). 
Occasionally a sorcerer produced sickness not by implanting an object 
in the body of his victim, but by stealing away his soul. A medicine-man 
might discover where it was hidden and restore it. If he failed, and the 
sick man was an important member of the community, relatives sometimes 
engaged two or three kusabindugeyu to sacrifice a white dog. They bound 
the animal, laid it on top of a pile of sticks, and stunned it with a club 
(or in some cases, the Indians thought, rendered it unconscious with a 
drug). Then they set fire to the pile, and, kneeling in front of it, tried to 
discern the location of the missing soul. Any w T riggling or howling of the 
dog was an evil omen that rendered their efforts vain. The Parry Islanders 
claim that this dog-sacrifice was a very ancient custom of their people, 
although resorted to only in grave emergencies. 
“ In early times the skies were always cloudless, but heavy fogs at night often 
caused the dew to drip from the wigwams. The first cloud arose in the east just before 
the coming of white men. The Indians did not understand the warning, so they 
sacrified a white dog, and six kusabindugeyu knelt with their faces to the ground, 
three on one side of the pyre and three on the other. Thus they discovered what 
the clouds signified. Since that day the skies have been often clouded and thunder- 
storms frequent” (Pegahmagabow). 
DJISKIU 
The Djiskiu, or, as he was more rarely called, Djasakid, ranked as 
high or higher than the kusabindugeyu , 1 but employed a totally different 
method for diagnosing the causes of sickness and for discovering things 
lost or far away. He used neither a drum nor a rattle, but conjured up his 
helping spirits inside a cylindrical lodge that was especially built for the 
purpose and afterwards dismantled. We may, therefore, call him a con- 
juror, as contrasted with the seer, kusabindugeyu, who laid claim to second 
sight, and the wabeno, who restricted himself almost exclusively to herbal 
medicines. 
The conjuror, like the other two classes of medicine-men, derived his 
power from a vision at puberty, when a manido visited him and conferred 
upon him the special gift of divining by means of the conjuring lodge. 
Most conjurors claimed thunder as their manido, because thunder was 
credited with granting the greatest power. They underwent no training 
subsequent to their visions, but could not practise until they reached man- 
hood; for although the manido’ s blessing gave them the requisite super- 
natural power, they needed full strength of mind and body to make use of 
it. Only men in the prime of life could conjure, and then not more often 
i Hoffman, J. (Seventh Ann. Rept., Bur. of Am. Ethn., Washington, pp. 157-1S8) does not separate 
these two kinds of medicine-men, calling both alike Jessakid. The Parry Island Indians, however, 
consider them quite distinct. 
