blows hard, it is because a woman delayed curing herself.

The reason the Tepehuanes make four feasts to despatch a dead woman
from this world, and only three for a man, is their belief that a
woman has more ribs than a man.

Unmarried women are not allowed to eat meat from the spinal column
of the deer, as those bones look like arrows. If they ate this meat,
their backs would grow curved and they would have back-aches.

The Tepehuanes do not eat pinole with meat, because their teeth would
fall out. After eating pinole they rinse their mouths.

One kind of squirrel is thought to change into a bat, another into
a parrot. The ground-squirrel changes into a serpent. Catfish become
otters, and larvae on the madrona-tree are transformed into doves.

When a hen crows, an accident is going to happen, unless the hen is
immediately killed.

The moon sometimes has to fight with the sun. If weather depended only
on the moon, it would rain always, for the benefit of the Tepehuanes.

The Pleiades are women, and the women of this world are their
sisters. They were living with a man who used to bring them their
food. One day he could not find anything, and drew blood from
the calf of his leg, and brought it in a leaf from the big-leaved
oak-tree. He told the women it was deer-blood, and thus he sustained
them. On discovering that it was his blood, they became very angry
and ascended to heaven, where they are yet to be seen.

When he came home in the afternoon he missed them, and followed their
tracks, but could not find them. He slept alone, and in the night he
said to the mice, which he took for the women, "Come, come to boil the
deer-blood!" He continued his search until he reached the place where
they had disappeared. The women, seeing from above how he went around
looking for them, laughed, and he caught sight of them and called out,
"Tie your girdles together that I may get up also." He climbed up;
but when he had almost reached them, the oldest of the women told
the others to let him drop, because he had deceived them. He became a
coyote and has remained in that shape ever since. If he had succeeded
in getting up, he would have become a star, the same as the women.

The three stars in the Belt of Orion are deer.

Chapter XXIV

On to Morelos--Wild and Broken Country--The Enormous
Flower-spike of the Amole--Subtropical Vegetation of Northwestern
Mexico--Destructive Ants--The Last of the Tubars--A S