HOW THE MAN FOOLED THE TIGER – Guiana An Indian went to a somewhat distant settlement to drink paiwarri, and on arriving there in the early afternoon, commenced imbibing. By midnight, the drinks being finished, he started on the return journey, although the house-master warned him not to leave then but to wait for daybreak, because an immense Tiger was known to be prowling about. Our friend would not be persuaded, however, to postpone his departure, but only said: "Oh! never mind. I am not afraid, and if I meet him I p. 219 will kill him." So saying, he hung his poto [stone-club]1 over his arm, and went out into the darkness. Being more or less drunk, he staggered along, and soon fell dead asleep on the road just about the very spot where the Tiger, of which he had been warned, used to cross. Tiger found him lying there motionless in the early morning, felt and sniffed him all over to see whether he was dead or alive, and finally sat down on him. This sobered the Indian, and Tiger, seeing that he was alive, started pulling down the bushes so as to clear a pathway along which he could drag the body to his lair. Having thus cleared a few yards, the animal returned and slung the man over his back so that the head and arms hung over one flank and the legs over the other. This gave the man his opportunity, for as the animal carried him along he caught hold of the bushes with his teeth and hands and so impeded Tiger's progress. The Tiger thought that the pathway which he had cleared was still too narrow, and accordingly replaced the burden on the ground and pulled down more bushes. The Indian thus fooled his captor some three or four times and, having now collected his wits, watched for the tiger to sling him once more on his back. No sooner had Tiger done so, than he struck the animal's head just above the ear with his stone-tipped club, and thus killed him. Making sure that Tiger was quite dead, he returned to the place where he had been drinking the night before, and told the house-master what had happened. The latter would not believe that any drunken Indian could have killed so big a tiger, but when he went and saw with his own eyes, he had to admit that his late guest had spoken truly. Among the Arawaks tradition has it that the old stone axes, or wakili-na-baro (lit. ancients-their-ax), came from a far distant country, from a place so far away that it took years for those who went in search of them to get back home again. Many a bizarre exploit is told in connection with the search for these stone implements, in the same way that many a superstition is attached to the weapon itself among several nations, both civilized and savage, elsewhere. The very length of the supposititious journey to be accomplished has given opportunity for fictions to be introduced with regard to the rivers and seas that had to be crossed, and the animal and plant life met with on the way. But beyond all the exaggeration consequent on the well-known desire of the foreign-traveled narrator to tell his stay-at-home friends so much more than his real experiences, and after making allowances for all the personal additions and embellishments that, in the absence of any written records, must necessarily and pardonably have crept into the telling of the story from one to another—there still flows through most of these extraordinary adventures a sort of ethical undercurrent conveying the lesson that disobedience to one's elders never remains unpunished. At the same time, I am not prepared to say whether the introduction of this ethical element is purposeful or accidental on the part of the old people, who usually relate these legends. The following exploits and occurrences, as well as others which I can not detail here, are all comprised in a story which I propose naming— An Inquiry into the Animism and Folk-Lore of the Guiana Indians, Walter E. Roth, from the Thirtieth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1908-1909, pp. 103-386, Washington D.C., 1915, and is now in the public domain.[ British Guiana ][ South America ]