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.