WINTER CEREMONIAL DANCES 73

Towards dawn, a herald goes through the village crying
loudly:

“Get up, you young men! Get up all ye people! Some-
thing strange has come upon the young man.”

The uninitiated are expelled and the kukusiut assemble in
X’s house where he is acting as if demented, biting any of his
associates except other Cannibals, Scratchers, Breakers, or
those whose patrons are ghosts. Meanwhile those who are
not members of the society cower in their own houses, and are
told that if they dare to look out, X, scenting them, will bite
them to death. At intervals during the morning, X goes
around to the other houses, naked and Savage, snapping at
everyone he sees. The uninitiated hide in the bedrooms, but
peek out occasionally and hear his growlings and the shrieks
of mock terror with which his associates greet his bites and
threats. The kukusiut tell non-members when it is safe for
them to leave their hiding-places for necessary purposes, but
at all other times they remain in concealment, listening with
fear to the dangerous maniac.

About midday X returns to his house where a large number
of kukusiut have assembled. The uninitiated certainly, and
perhaps some of the kukusiut as well, believe that Cannibals
are carried away to the land above where they are exposed
to great dangers, and to prevent this an effort is always made
to bind the dancer. The marshals and X’s relatives have made
the necessary preparations, consisting of the manufacture of a
long rope, in addition to the usual dyed cedar-bark collar and
a bear-skin. The kukusiut enter whole-heartedly into the
dramatic spirit of the rite, and the robe is thrust over X in
spite of his furious struggles. Then the collar is forced over
his head, while the women drone and the whistles sound eerily,
to the wonder of the uninitiated listening from adjacent houses.
The thick, cable-like rope is doubled and a circle of kukusiut
form around the seemingly demented dancer, each man holding
asection. X rushes against one part of the circle after another,
as if to force his way out; sometimes he bends down, and those