the girl’s hair and enjoined her to abstain most strictly from eating flesh of any kind until her hair should be grown long enough to hide her ears.  Meanwhile the diviners drew omens of her future character from the various birds or animals that flew past or crossed her path.  If they saw a parrot, they would say she was a chatterbox; if an owl, she was lazy and useless for domestic labours, and so on.[132] In similar circumstances the Chiriguanos of southeastern Bolivia hoisted the girl in her hammock to the roof, where she stayed for a month:  the second month the hammock was let half-way down from the roof; and in the third month old women, armed with sticks, entered the hut and ran about striking everything they met, saying they were hunting the snake that had wounded the girl.[133] The Lengua Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco under similar circumstances hang the girl in her hammock from the roof of the house, but they leave her there only three days and nights, during which they give her nothing to eat but a little Paraguay tea or boiled maize.  Only her mother or grandmother has access to her; nobody else approaches or speaks to her.  If she is obliged to leave the hammock for a little, her friends take great care to prevent her from touching the Boyrusu, which is an imaginary serpent that would swallow her up.  She must also be very careful not to set foot on the droppings of fowls or animals, else she would suffer from sores on the throat and breast.  On the third day they let her down from the hammock, cut her hair, and make her sit in a corner of the room with her face turned to the wall.  She may speak to nobody, and must abstain from flesh and fish.  These rigorous observances she must practise for nearly a year.  Many girls die or are injured for life in consequence of the hardships they endure at this time.  Their only occupations during their seclusion are spinning and weaving.[134]

[Seclusion of girls at puberty among the Yuracares of Bolivia.]

Among the Yuracares, an Indian tribe of Bolivia, at the eastern foot of the Andes, when a girl perceives the signs of puberty, she informs her parents.  The mother weeps and the father constructs a little hut of palm leaves near the house.  In this cabin he shuts up his daughter so that she cannot see the light, and there she remains fasting rigorously for four days.  Meantime the mother, assisted by the women of the neighbourhood, has brewed a large quantity of the native intoxicant called chicha, and poured it into wooden troughs and palm leaves.  On the morning of the fourth day, three hours before the dawn, the girl’s father, having arrayed himself in his savage finery, summons all his neighbours with loud cries.  The damsel is seated on a stone, and every guest in turn cuts off a lock of her hair, and running away hides it in the hollow trunk of a tree in the depths of the forest.  When they have all done so and seated themselves again gravely in the circle, the girl offers to each of them a calabash