34 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [ Vou. Vv.

and her brothers knew that the animal was nobody else than her hus-
band who, man by the daytime, became dog during the night.

For her relations with the brute, the woman was abandoned, and in due
course of time she bore six little dogs, which she kept in a satchel. One
day that she came back from a visit to her rabbit-snares, she noticed foot-
prints as of children on the hearth. Desirous of learning whence they
proceeded, she attached a long cord to the lacing-string of the sack con-
taining her little ones and, telling them that she was going again to visit
her snares she left, but merely went to hide herself a short distance off
behind a bush. The little dogs believing themselves alone and unseen,
came out of their sack, when their mother pulled the cord, thereby closing
it against three, two males and one female, who had come out transformed
into boys and girl respectively. Those that remained dogs she aban-
doned, while the two boys became powerful hunters and, marrying their
sister, were the ancestors of the Dog-Rib tribe."

Here ends in the original text of Petitot what that brafich of the Dene
family regards as its national legend. One particular of some sociologi-
cal importance we seem justified in inferring from the above, viz.: that
polyandry did not seem repulsive to the social notions of the Dog-Ribs,
any more than their congeners, the Tsé’kéhne, deemed it, until a recent
date, inconsistent with propriety. That the former tribe is too exclusive
in its appropriation of the tale is shown by the fact that the Tsipyoh’tin
possess a tradition substantially the same as that just related, and all the
main details of which are identical with those of the Carrier story.
Among the Tsijyoh’tin, the lodge is simply replaced by the “Ysyan or
subterranean hut, while the bear-berries of the Carrier myth are with
them a species of tuberculous root, of which they are particularly fond.

The Hare Indians, another Déné tribe?, share with the Kutchin, the
northernmost division of that exclusive family, the belief in a tradition
according to which “they formerly dwelt very far away in the west and
beyond the sea, in the midst of a very powerful nation among which
magicians used to transform themselves into dogs or wolves during the
night, while they became men again during the day. These people had
taken wives from among the Déné*.”, The Kutchin describe that nation
as very immoral and going almost naked. According to Petitot, the
same Indians believe also in the existence, on the Asiatic continent, of a
nation of dog-men, the upper part of whose body they state to be that of

1 Traditions indiennes du Canada Nord-Quest, par ? Abbe E. Petitot, p. 301.
2 Habitat: Mackenzie, Anderson and MacFarlane Rivers.

3 Essai sur lortgine des Déné-Dindjté ; Paris, 1876, p. xxviii.