The Guayquiries of the Orinoco think that when a woman has her courses, everything upon which she steps will die, and that if a man treads on the place where she has passed, his legs will immediately swell up.[219] Among the Guaraunos of the same great river, women at their periods are regarded as unclean and kept apart in special huts, where all that they need is brought to them.[220] In like manner among the Piapocos, an Indian tribe on the Guayabero, a tributary of the Orinoco, a menstruous woman is secluded from her family every month for four or five days.  She passes the time in a special hut, whither her husband brings her food; and at the end of the time she takes a bath and resumes her usual occupations.[221] So among the Indians of the Mosquito territory in Central America, when a woman is in her courses, she must quit the village for seven or eight days.  A small hut is built for her in the wood, and at night some of the village girls go and sleep with her to keep her company.  Or if the nights are dark and jaguars are known to be prowling in the neighbourhood, her husband will take his gun or bow and sleep in a hammock near her.  She may neither handle nor cook food; all is prepared and carried to her.  When the sickness is over, she bathes in the river, puts on clean clothes, and returns to her household duties.[222] Among the Bri-bri Indians of Costa Rica a girl at her first menstruation retires to a hut built for the purpose in the forest, and there she must stay till she has been purified by a medicine-man, who breathes on her and places various objects, such as feathers, the beaks of birds, the teeth of beasts, and so forth, upon her body.  A married woman at her periods remains in the house with her husband, but she is reckoned unclean (bukuru) and must avoid all intimate relations with him.  She uses for plates only banana leaves, which, when she has done with them, she throws away in a sequestered spot; for should a cow find and eat them, the animal would waste away and perish.  Also she drinks only out of a special vessel, because any person who should afterwards drink out of the same vessel would infallibly pine away and die.[223]

[Dread and seclusion of menstruous women among the Indians of North America.]

Among most tribes of North American Indians the custom was that women in their courses retired from the camp or the village and lived during the time of their uncleanness in special huts or shelters which were appropriated to their use.  There they dwelt apart, eating and sleeping by themselves, warming themselves at their own fires, and strictly abstaining from all communications with men, who shunned them just as if they were stricken with the plague.  No article of furniture used in these menstrual huts might be used in any other, not even the flint and steel with which in the old days the fires were kindled.  No one would borrow a light from a woman in her seclusion.  If a white man in his ignorance asked to light his