[Malevolent Spirits (Need for Regular Sacrifices)]

Indeed, from what I can learn, there are but few of these familiars but do do evil to their votaries if they, the votaries, the Indians, neglect performing the regular, annual, or perhaps more distant periodical sacrifice. And [for these sacrifices], their familiar tells them what it is he expects.

[Accounts of Pahkack]

[Attacks at Home and While Hunting]

A few days ago in the night between the 31st March and 1st April, this Indian was sleeping in an old house I sent him to when, at a late hour in the night, he was pulled most violently out of his bed so that his wife, that was lying beside him, awoke and with difficulty kept him down, though he also struggled himself to make his familiar leave his hold. And the house shook violently.

The next day he sent me his wife to ask a little grease to make a sacrifice. (Burnt offering. *God forgive me the comparison, which by the bye, is not meant to ridicule, but is really the case.) I gave her a little, and the husband came the same evening to sleep with us. Upon enquiry, he told me thus:

It was a Skeleton. He was displeased with me because I did not make him my usual offering. And yet he knows that I am pitiful, that I cannot move to hunt myself, but am beholding to others for every mouthful I and my family eat. But they are wicked when they think themselves neglected or abandoned, and think nothing of carrying off an Indian and throwing him in some distant place, dangerous precipice, or other place where he must perish if not succored by some other more kind one.

"Some years back," continued he,

I went out one night in the fall to hunt moose. I had tied my canoe very securely in the rushes and there was waiting alone to hear the moose either come to the lake, or cry after the dam, for it was in the rutting season.

(And the Indians commonly go out in this manner at that season, for the buck has a certain cry which he makes at that time, either to call the female, or as with the domestic cattle, to exult, as one might think, from their capers.)