Rule For Tracking Large Game

p. 22

RULE FOR TRACKING LARGE GAME

Suppose a man starts early in the morning tracking an animal. Another man starts later and comes in ahead and kills the animal. It belongs to the one who first started to track it.

After hunting all day, when the people were about to make the last circle, Eagle Man announced that if anyone killed anything in this last circle it would belong to him (the killer). All the other game was to go to the Antelope Man for food for the katsina. (The reason Iatiku had made Antelope Man leader (chief) was so when the katsina came he would have food brought to him to feed the katsina.) ⁵⁵ Eagle Man then announced, "You may go home and rest."

The day after the hunt, the people who had killed game were supposed to roast it and have it ready for the Eagle Man, who was to gather it up and bring it to the Antelope Man. This was the instruction given by Eagle Man at the last announcement on the hunt: "If a rabbit, you are to skin it carefully and save the skin. Break the upper part of the legs of the rabbit and fold the front legs across the breast and hind legs across the back." He told them to take some, corn meal and pollen and place them under each leg of the rabbit, to thank Mother Earth and pray that she would raise more game. He also told them not to put the rabbit into the fire or coals head first when roasting it, but to face it out so its spirit could escape and return to be reborn and thus furnish more game. The spirit of the rabbit would take with it as food the corn and pollen offerings placed under the legs.

Such were the instructions to the hunters. They were always to be followed so they would have game.

When a deer is killed, it is cut up where it falls; the legs are cut off and the ribs taken out. The head, the backbone, and the skin are all connected in one piece. When cut open, the entrails are placed to one side on the ground. The bladder is taken out and placed in the center of the entrails ⁵⁶ and the hunter prays that the deer be reborn and that he will have good luck with game. He has corn meal and pollen and pieces of beads and shells which he sprinkles on.--All of these practices are according to instructions given by Eagle Man on the first hunt.

Footnotes

22:55 Communal hunts for small game are almost always to provide food for the katsina and for fetishes, See Boas, 1928 pt. 1; pp. 296-97; White, 1935, pp. 144-46.

22:56 The vulva or the penis and testicles are placed in the stomach (White, 1942).