62

The gambling games were also slightly different from those of the other
Sekani. One was played with from two to four sticks, but my informant
had forgotten the details. In another a man on one side juggled in his
hands two bear’s teeth or bones, one of them specially marked, and the
guesser on the other side had to choose the hand which concealed the
marked bone. Other games were:

(a) Snow-snake, played with a long heavy stick and no snow-bank,

(6b) Hoop and spear. A man stood at one end of a level patch of ground and bowled
a hoop towards another man at the other end. Fast runners pursued it and tried
to catch it on long sticks before it reached the mark.

(c) Two men interlocked their middle fingers and tugged against each other; or,
alternately, they tugged on the bone of an animal.

(d) Men tested their strength by trying to break in their hands the hind leg bone of
the beaver.

(e) Men inflated the bladders of different animals, dried them and tried to burst
them with their fists. A moderately strong man could burst the bladders of the
caribou, moose, and bear, but no one, it is said, could burst the bladder of the
mountain goat.

(f) Tug of war with a rawhide line, or with a slippery pole. In this game the sexes

often took sides against one another.

Boys played with bull-roarers, thin, flat laths of wood, wider at the bottom than

at the top, attached. by caribou sinew to a stick and swung through the air. They

also made buzzers from the knuckle bones of the caribou.

(h) Girls played hide and seek to train themselves to be quick of eye.

wa

(g

When a man died women relatives belonging to his own phratry
washed the corpse and consigned it to the care of the other two phratries,
whose members gathered to weep and burn it. They wrapped it in skins
proportionate in number to the dead man’s dignity and burned it within
twenty-four hours, hastening the death-rites through fear of the ghost.
In more recent times the Long Grass Indians have substituted Christian
burial for cremation; they lay out the corpse for at least two days, and
carry it for interment to a large graveyard at the southern end of
Hotlesklwa lake (about latitude 57° 20’, longitude 127° 55’), the lake
“where fish are as numerous as grains of earth.”1 :

At a convenient time after the cremation the dead man’s phratry
feasted the other two phratries, and paid the people who had performed
the obsequies. At the same time it bestowed on the dead man’s successor,
usually his sister’s son, the crest ornaments and rank of the deceased. If
the man had belonged to the Wolf phratry, for example, his successor
donned a wolf skin and entered the lodge with drooping mien to the
accompaniment of a mournful song. Presently the singers changed to a
lively tune and he danced more cheerfully, finally taking his seat in the
new place to which he had fallen heir. A brother or sister of the deceased
then entered the lodge, clad in a robe of tanned caribou hide decorated
with the phratric crest either painted in red or worked in porcupine quills;
and after them other kinsmen entered garbed in much the same fashion.

‘ According to Angus Beaton, a white trapper and prospector who had travelled extensively in the Groundhog
country, there is a large graveyard at ‘‘Spruce island,”’ an isolated forest of spruce trees close to Buckington lake.