The Tepehuanes never drink direct from a brook, but scoop up the water with their hands, else in the night the master of the spring might carry them inside of the mountain.
They never cut their finger and toe nails, for fear of getting blind.
They say that the seat of the soul is between the stomach and the chest, and they never wake up a man who is asleep, as his soul may be wandering about. Sometimes a man is ill because his soul is away. The doctors may be unable to make it come back, and still the man lives. Soul is breath; and when a man dies, his soul passes through the fontanels of the head, or through the eyes or the nostrils or the mouth.
If anyone steps over a man, the latter will not be able to kill another deer in his life. A woman can be passed in this way without such danger.
When the wind blows hard, it is because a woman delayed curing herself.
The reason the Tepehuanes make four feasts to despatch a dead woman from this world, and only three for a man, is their belief that a woman has more ribs than a man.
Unmarried women are not allowed to eat meat from the spinal column of the deer, as those bones look like arrows. If they ate this meat, their backs would grow curved and they would have back-aches.
The Tepehuanes do not eat pinole with meat, because their teeth would fall out. After eating pinole they rinse their mouths.
One kind of squirrel is thought to change into a bat, another into a parrot. The ground-squirrel changes into a serpent. Catfish become otters, and larvae on the madroña-tree are transformed into doves.
When a hen crows, an accident is going to happen, unless the hen is immediately killed.