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(b) I need your help, O caribou.
Come swiftly to me.
You see I have laid my hands on the sufferer.
Come and lay your hoofs where I have laid my hands.
I need your help.
Without your help there is no healing in my hands today.
Come so quickly that your tail stands erect.

The songs and dreams did not originate with each new medicine-man,
but were inherited mystically from some ancestor. A great medicine-man
who had received power from many animals might even impart some of it
to his son; but only if the latter were sickly, since the father was bestow-
ing breath from his own life. Father and son then slept together under
one blanket inside the family lodge, and when the father dreamed of his
medicine song the son dreamed the same song with him, and could sing
it without prompting when he awakened; the medicine power accompanied
the song.

Every medicine-man had his own charms or amulets, things that his
dream animal told him to use when effecting a cure. He might wear the
velvet of a caribou horn attached to his clothing or carry it in a bag by
his side wrapped in white swansdown; or his charm might be a strip of
fur from a mountain goat or a grizzly bear. Sometimes he painted it on
his drum, for the Long Grass medicine-men, although rejecting the rattle
of the coast tribes, adopted the use of the drum. When he was called in to
heal a patient the door was shut, and no one allowed to enter or go out.
Little children who might be present had to remain quiet and take no part
in the performance. The medicine-man sat beside the patient and sang
his song, and the audience joined in the singing. At a certain stage he laid
his charm on the sick man, and his medicine power, working through the
charm, effected a cure. The patient was not healed at one sitting; but the
ceremony had to be performed repeatedly, night after night, until the cure
was complete.

This was the true medicine-man, the only man who had medicine for
healing. He charged so high a price for his services that he was summoned
for serious cases only. For lesser cases the natives would call in a dreamer,
a lower order of medicine-man, who underwent the same training, but
received power from his dream only to determine the cause of a malady,
not to cure it. Often the mere knowledge of the cause sufficed to dispel
the ailment; if it failed the dreamer advised the relatives to call in a fully
qualified medicine-man to co-operate in the cure.

The procedure of dreamers differed slightly, but one woman treated
her patient in the following manner. She sat down beside him and asked
her heart whether he would live or die. Her heart suddenly leaped into
her mouth, rendering her half unconscious. Bystanders placed swansdown
on her head and vermilion on her cheeks to allay its throbbing. Gradually
she recovered her poise, and gave her diagnosis. If the case were serious
she might say “I saw the spirit of an animal resting on his chest; if it

reaches his throat he will die. Summon a real medicine-man who has cut
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