WINTER CEREMONIAL DANCES 213

they sit in silence, awaiting his arrival. Presently word is sent
to him, for he is always hiding near, and he comes through the
door and sits near the fire. But he does not resemble the man
who left the village. His face and body have been stained
green with crushed leaves, in imitation of the colour of the
dead; in his hand he carries a bone, said to be part of the leg
of a dead man, though in reality it is from a deer. After him
the ghosts enter one by one. They are a number of Aukusiut
who have been painted black and green to give them an un-
earthly appearance; there is no fixed pattern, each following
his own, or the carpenter’s ideas of the uncanny, though the
body colour on which the other tints are smeared is usually
white. Each dead man has a special name and each acts
accordingly in an eccentric way. One enters walking back-
wards, another hops on one leg, and a third walks on his
hands—because ghosts always act in the opposite manner to
mortals. Each trills in a peculiar way and performs something
like a dance, waving his arms to and fro, up and down, con-
stantly pointing with one finger, before lying down close to the
central fire. With them enters a woman with painted face,
clad in a blanket and carrying a basket on her back; she is
Algwulus, who gathers berries in the land of the dead. She
begins to go around picking up any small articles that she sees
and depositing them in her basket, from which anyone picks
them out at will and returns them to the places whence they
had been taken. One of the first actors to appear carries a
stick for time beating, and acts as leader of the ghost singers.
Whenever a spark from the fire lights on one of the dead,
causing the latter to jump, the leader pounds violently with
his stick. When all are present, the leader beats time and they
Prepare to leave. Ghosts are feckless, however; consequently,
instead of going straight to the door, some go in one direction,
some in another, but all are at length shepherded outside. X
and his visitors, with a large number of kukusiut, go to every
house in the village repeating the same procedure, in silence,
except for the trill of the dead men. The uninitiated do not