full of very strong chicha.  Before the wassailing begins, the various fathers perform a curious operation on the arms of their sons, who are seated beside them.  The operator takes a very sharp bone of an ape, rubs it with a pungent spice, and then pinching up the skin of his son’s arm he pierces it with the bone through and through, as a surgeon might introduce a seton.  This operation he repeats till the young man’s arm is riddled with holes at regular intervals from the shoulder to the wrist.  Almost all who take part in the festival are covered with these wounds, which the Indians call culucute.  Having thus prepared themselves to spend a happy day, they drink, play on flutes, sing and dance till evening.  Rain, thunder, and lightning, should they befall, have no effect in damping the general enjoyment or preventing its continuance till after the sun has set.  The motive for perforating the arms of the young men is to make them skilful hunters; at each perforation the sufferer is cheered by the promise of another sort of game or fish which the surgical operation will infallibly procure for him.  The same operation is performed on the arms and legs of the girls, in order that they may be brave and strong; even the dogs are operated on with the intention of making them run down the game better.  For five or six months afterwards the damsel must cover her head with bark and refrain from speaking to men.  The Yuracares think that if they did not submit a young girl to this severe ordeal, her children would afterwards perish by accidents of various kinds, such as the sting of a serpent, the bite of a jaguar, the fall of a tree, the wound of an arrow, or what not.[135]

[Seclusion of girls at puberty among the Indians of the Gran Chaco.]

Among the Matacos or Mataguayos, an Indian tribe of the Gran Chaco, a girl at puberty has to remain in seclusion for some time.  She lies covered up with branches or other things in a corner of the hut, seeing no one and speaking to no one, and during this time she may eat neither flesh nor fish.  Meantime a man beats a drum in front of the house.[136] Similarly among the Tobas, another Indian tribe of the same region, when a chief’s daughter has just attained to womanhood, she is shut up for two or three days in the house, all the men of the tribe scour the country to bring in game and fish for a feast, and a Mataco Indian is engaged to drum, sing, and dance in front of the house without cessation, day and night, till the festival is over.  As the merrymaking lasts for two or three weeks, the exhaustion of the musician at the end of it may be readily conceived.  Meat and drink are supplied to him on the spot where he pays his laborious court to the Muses.  The proceedings wind up with a saturnalia and a drunken debauch.[137] Among the Yaguas, an Indian tribe of the Upper Amazon, a girl at puberty is shut up for three months in a lonely hut in the forest, where her mother brings her