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_ “The knife medicine preserved my grandfather from sickness all his
life. When he was very old he obtained for the first time a steel knife that
would keep a sharp edge. He said to his people, ‘ My knife keeps sharp. II
shall die soon.’ Soon afterwards he died.”

The notion of sickness medicine was capable of great expansion in the
hands of an imaginative or ambitious Indian. Early explorers among the
Athapaskan tribes of the Mackenzie River basin tell of strange practices by
the medicine-men, such as the swallowing of knives and long boards. ‘These
tricks were rare but not unknown among the Sekani, where certain possessors
of sickness medicine claimed to be able to swallow bunches of porcupine
quills. Some of the neighbouring Carrier tribes practised walking over red-
hot coals, and employed the drum and rattle in their medicine ritual. They
had also an elaborate ritual for acquiring hunting medicine, and prayed over
offerings of burning caribou fat when game was scarce. None of these
customs, however, were adopted by the Sekani.

Nevertheless, the Sekani did acquire, either from the Carrier or from
the Gitksan (since it prevailed among both), the belief in a very strange
“medicine power” that seems wholly alien to their mode of thought, but
is in harmony with the beliefs and practices of the tribes along the Pacific
coast. It was a belief in what one man called “air medicine,” though its
name at Fort McLeod is anatak, at Fort Grahame senidje, words that the
natives seem unable to translate. It was an intangible thing, like air, or
wind, pregnant with medicine power like an animal, but infinitely more
potent. It would squeeze a man between its “hands” and place him in a
big kettle strewn with feathers to keep his body warm; and it filled him with
such explosive force that he shot through the air like a bullet from a gun.
One man at Fort McLeod who had acquired this medicine chanted the
formula he had learned (it consisted of meaningless syllables only) and
was immediately shot across the lake into the woods on the far side. Some
hunters sought"”him the next day, and found him lying on the ground, half
dead. Another man was carried out of sight and did not return until two
years later, when his brother, who was hunting groundhogs, found him on
a mountain side, strong and well. Five years afterwards the two men
ascended another mountain to hunt goats; but when the medicine man
approached the summit he sang his anatak formula and flew far away.
He was seen again only once, when a hunter sighted him from a distance.
Anatak gave the gift of foresight; its possessor knew several days before-
hand what game he would kill. Another medicine, called ixwasi, that
closely resembled it, caused its possessor to fly through the air like a bird,
or like a tiny transparent man.

Fort Grahame natives, who called the same medicine senidje, gave a
slightly different account. Senidje, they said, struck a man between the
shoulders like a gust of wind, or caught him by the hair, and flung him
many yards over the ground. He lost his wits, and in that condition
received instruction and medicine power from senidje. ‘Their description