nt effects of the wind. In the
pairing season these birds keep up a chattering noise, which to my
ears was far from disagreeable, but very irritating to a Mexican whom
I employed. He used to shoot the birds because they annoyed him.

Corn is the most important agricultural product of the Tarahumares. The
average crop of a family may be estimated at six or twelve fanegas. One
exceptionally rich Tarahumare, now dead, is said to have raised as
much as four hundred fanegas a year, but this was a fact unique in the
history of the tribe. The people also raise beans, squashes, chile,
and tobacco, all on an exceedingly small scale. On the highlands,
the primitive plough already described (page 121) is still used
sometimes, though it is rapidly being superseded by ploughs of Mexican
pattern. In the arroyos and barrancas, where the condition of the
land makes ploughing impossible, the Indians use the ancient mode
of agriculture, still in vogue among remote natives of Mexico and
called _coamillar_. They cut down the trees, clear a piece of land
from brushwood, and leave it in this condition until just before the
wet season sets in. Then they burn the wood, which by that time is
well dried up, and plant the corn in the ashes. They simply make a
hole in the earth with a stick, drop a few grains of corn into it,
and close it up with the foot. Of the usual number of grains I am
not aware. The Tepehuanes use four. Their hoes are generally bought
from the Mexicans or else home-made, the natural knotted growths of
tree limbs being utilised. Women never assist in ploughing, though
they may be seen helping in the fields with the weeding and hoeing,
and even with the harvesting.

In the sierra a piece of land may yield good crops for three years
in succession without manure, but in the broad mountain valleys and
on the mesas a family can use the same field year after year for
twenty or thirty seasons. On the other hand, down in the barrancas,
a field cannot be used more than two years in succession, because
the corn-plants in that time are already suffocated with weeds. The
planting is done from the middle of April to the first week in July,
and the harvest begins about the first week in October and lasts
until the beginning of December.

Communal principles prevail in clearing the fields, in ploughing--each
furrow in a field is ploughed by a different man--in corn planting,
in hoeing, weeding, harvesting, gathering wood for feasts, in f