If a man does any harm to a powerful sorcerer, the latter, after death, enters into a mountain lion or jaguar or bear, and watches by the wayside until the offender comes, when he kills him.

Sorcerers are also believed to prevent rain from falling, and therefore the people were once much pleased when they saw me photographing a sorcerer.  The camera was considered a powerful rain-maker, and was thought to make the bad man clean.  The people may chastise a man suspected of sorcery, to frighten him from doing further mischief.  A sick person also is supposed to improve when the sorcerer who made him ill is punished; but if accidents and misfortune continue to happen, the accused man may be killed.  Such extreme measures have been resorted to even in recent years, though rarely.

The magical powers of a sorcerer are appalling.  When a Tarahumare walks with a sorcerer in the forest and they meet a bear, the sorcerer may say:  “Don’t kill him; it is I; don’t do him any harm!” or if an owl screeches at night, the sorcerer may say:  “Don’t you hear me?  It is I who am calling.”

The sorcerer dies a terrible death.  Many dogs bark and run away and come back; they look like fire, but they are not; they are the evil thoughts of the sorcerer.  The river, too, makes a greater noise as it flows, as if somebody were dipping up water and pouring it out again.  Uncanny, weird noises come from every part of the house, and all the people in it are much frightened.  Hardly anyone goes to talk to the dying man, and no one bids him good-bye.  The Christian Tarahumares do not bury him in the churchyard with other people, but alone in a remote cave, and they bury all his things with him—­his machete his axe, and heavy things that other people never take along, but which the sorcerer, because he is very powerful, can carry with him when he goes to heaven.

As we have seen, the medical education of the shamans is extremely limited.  Their rational materia medica is confined to the hikuli cactus and a few roots and plants.  Aside from this they have a cure for snakebites which is really remarkable.  The injured man kills the reptile, cuts out its liver and gall, and smears the latter over the wound; he may also eat a piece of the liver, but it must be taken from the animal that inflicted the injury; then he will be well again in three days.  If people die of snake-bites, it is because the reptile escaped.  The gall of a rattlesnake has a sickening smell; even my dogs were repulsed by it when I once killed a four-foot rattler.  The method may be considered as in accord with the modern theory that the bile of many animals contains strong antitoxins.

However, there is nothing new under the sun.  In the Talmud we find recommended as a cure for hydrophobia to eat the liver of the dog that bites one; and in the Apocrypha we read that Tobias was cured of blindness by the gall of a fish.

Most surprising of all is the fact that this tribe, which to-day shows but very slight knowledge of surgery, should in former times have practised trepanning.  That the Tarahumares understood this art is evident from two skulls which I brought back from their country.  The skulls were found under the following circumstances: