PUBERTY CUSTOMS. 243

The reason of these prescriptions, even in this case, is not far to seek.
The shedding of human blood and all acts leading thereto are defiling!. There-
fore the same precautions used by the pubescent girl must be observed by
the apprentice warrior.

A long leather cord attached both scratcher and tube to the Apache’s
belt and to each other, though some fractions of the tribe usually wore both
in the hair.

As to the drinking reed, Captain Bourke hazards himself tentative expla-
nations which he would not put forth if he had lived in the north and assi-
milated the ideas of the natives there. He suggests that the earliest conditions
of the Apaches having obliged them to resort to all sorts of expedients in
cooking and serving their food and drink, the reed may be a device which
has survived the introduction of forks and spoons’, and was at one time
necessary to avoid “the danger of burning the lips with both, or of taking
into the mouth much earthly and vegetable matter or ice from springs and
streams” 3.

* Cf. our chapter on War.
? Forks are, of course, an innovation among the Indians; but spoons seem to have been
known to them from time immemorial.
* Bourke, ubi supra.
16*