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find a red leaf, which he brings to the body to be rubbed over the deceased's lips to collect his spit. The boy takes the leaf and places it under the tolo, or ancestral spirit shrine. The next morning the men assemble their nets, dogs, spears, and supplies and depart together for the two- to three-day paye leka hunt, carrying with them the leaf which will be cast inside the first-strung circle of nets. |
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Nets will be strung (gbase kogo, "raised") from five to twelve times in the course of the day, depending on hunting fortune and the size of the hunting group. At evening camp, men may discuss that or a previous day's hunt, or they and the camp's women and children may tell mato, or animal tales, to one another around the campfires. The talk is important; talking of animals brings dreams of animals. A frequent late-night conversational ending is "dream well," for dreaming of animals means killing those animals on the following day. Talk has power. As talk appropriate to the forest, mato are rarely told in the village and then, never before sundown (not even when the anthropologist asks for a special late-afternoon taping session). Conversely, youths talking about village affairs at the forest camp are frequently rebuked for speaking "village talk" (njumbi we ngi), deemed inappropriate to the hunting camp. |
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Awakening or opening the forest may require other practices. While medicine belts, customarily worn on private hunts, are not permitted and use of private medicines is eschewed, hunters whose nets are not attracting game may legitimately ask a neighbor to engage in reciprocal rubbing of skin with a particular leaf (daleye) or they may take a leafy branch and beat the forest floor with it until they cut through the earth (nya zonga), in either case addressing, while acting, the names of all those animals they wish to step into (ta) their nets. |
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Of particular interest is the rite of maleye ekalo, the splitting of ekalo tree sticks. After the stringing of the nets but before the driving of the game into the nets, children and strangers will be given pairs of partially split, foot-long ekalo sticks, sticks from the tree used to build the ancestral spirit shrine, and asked to knock them loudly together. After this has gone on for a minute or two, all are asked to tear their split sticks in half and to toss the pieces into the hunting circle, he with the "good back" going first. |
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The reference to a "good back" brings us full circle, for the forest oracles in Pagibeti divinatory practices stood out in our review of those practices by making that feature a requirement for oracle manipulation. Seen in the context of categories of persons relevant to nonoracular as well as to oracular practices employed in assuring a successful communal hunt, it loses its anomalous status. |
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If divinatory power in the village is frequently based on special knowledge and medicines or on initiation into a cult of affliction (diviner of the spirit-possessed or the rubbing-board oracle) then the opposite characteristics are valued in forest divination. In the practice of the hunt, children, strangers, and possessors of good backs are key actors. A child carries the leaf bearing the dead man's saliva into the forest to awaken it, a child may carry the mbolongo from site to site, and a child or stranger will beat and split the ekalo sticks to call animals into the nets. Strangers are given key roles in rites and local people are chosen to perform mbolongo not on the basis of the usual village authority principles |
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