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or a bear and carried it to their lodge, when, if they favoured his suit, they 
invited him to stay and share the feast. Fear of witchcraft generally 
prevented the outright rejection of a suitor, for he or his parents might 
depart in anger, saying, “Perhaps you will always have your daughter 
with you,” i.e., we will kill her by sorcery and her shade will haunt your 
wigwam; or at some later time they might disturb the souls of the girl 
and of the man she married and render her marriage unhappy. A youth 
who declined the offer of a girl’s hand ran a similar risk. 
“ In my boyhood I fasted for a vision, but no manido would come to me. Two 
or three years afterwards I became a Christian. Then a certain man and his wife 
asked me to marry their daughter, and were so greatly vexed when I refused that I 
left their neighbourhood and went to Cape Croker, There I attended two wakes in 
succession, and did not sleep for two nights. On the third night, as I lay sleeping 
in my cabin, I dreamed that a boat approached me and was about to strike me in 
the chest. Terrified into waking, I leaped from the bed, and heard a wild turkey 
trying to enter through the roof. I recited the Lord’s Prayer and it vanished, for it 
was not a real turkey, but a member of the family I had offended in the guise of 
a witch. 
When my relatives heard of my adventure they warned me never to eat at that 
family’s house, and for a long time I avoided it. But some years after I had married 
a friend asked me to call there with him, and the girl’s mother pressed us to stay for 
a meal. She then put medicine in my food, which made me so ill that I could hardly 
reach home. Fortunately my father-in-law, who was a skilful medicine-man, arrived 
the very next day. He brewed some medicine in a pot of boiling water and gave me 
four draughts of it, the first three to make me vomit out the poison and the fourth 
to strengthen my stomach. He then brewed me another tonic, and after some weeks 
I recovered. I met the woman at a sugar-making camp the next spring, when she 
asked me if I was quite well again. 'Yes,’ I answered, ‘but you nearly killed me.’ ‘I 
did not harm you,’ she said. ‘I have never harmed any one in my life.’ We knew 
of course, that she lied, but we did not attempt to punish her” (James Walker). 
The accepted suitor went to live with his bride's parents, for whom 
he hunted and fished until the time when he could take his wife home. The 
Parry Islanders can recall no marriage ceremony beyond the separation 
of the young couple by a maple log during the first four nights, after which 
they became really man and wife. Sometimes they lived in the parents' 
wigwam, 1 at other times they erected a separate lodge for themselves. 
The equipment and furniture they needed was very slight. The bridegroom 
required his bow and arrows, a knife (in post-European times an ax also) , 
a canoe, a toboggan, and the inevitable “medicines”; the girl her own 
knife (and ax), an awl, and a bone needle. Clothing and skins for 
bedding were indispensable from the outset, but thread, bark vessels, and 
rush mats she could make to meet their needs. If they were unhappy in 
their union they could separate at will, and the girl’s parents or brothers 
might also take her away from her husband if they were dissatisfied with 
his conduct. Usually, but not always, any children that were born followed 
the mother. The young couple often returned to the bridegroom’s people 
after the birth of their first child, or at the end of about a year; but many 
men remained with their wives’ bands permanently. 
When the daughter of a chief or influential man had several suitors 
whom it would have been impolitic to offend, her father occasionally enlisted 
the help of relatives in staging a series of contests. The suitors then 
1 There was no mother-in-law taboo. 
