[9] The evil spirit is supposed to take up its quarters behind the toldos.
[10] While prosecuting the inquiries which led to the compilation of this account of the Tehuelches it was thought that the author desired to take a bride from the toldos. He was informed that seven mares would purchase a young and efficient helpmate.
[11] Tehuelche beauties are not above wearing a tail of false hair.
[12] On the occasions I describe, even the asadores (iron spits three feet in length and sharpened at the end which enters the ground) are taken away and buried by the young women.
[13] These customs are now dying out.
[14] According to Tehuelche beliefs, the Good Spirit created the animals in the caves of a certain mountain called "God's Hill," and gave them to his people for food.
[15] Here I disagree with Captain G. C. Musters, who claims excellent walking powers for the Tehuelches. That they can walk well if forced to do so is possible, but we need look no farther than their boots to perceive that they rarely go afoot. The Patagonian pampas are covered with thorn and the thin foot-covering of the Indians would be torn to pieces in the course of a two-hours tramp over such ground.
[16] Nansen's "Esquimaux Life."
[17] The Tehuelches are enormously above the Onas of Tierra del Fuego in the scale of civilisation. A Fuegian woman has been known to live in the Tehuelchian tents, but how she came there I am unable to say. On the other hand, I have never heard of any Tehuelche living with the Tierra del Fuegians, and cannot conceive such a state of things to be possible. But the Tehuelches will mix occasionally with the Araucanian tribes of Northern Patagonia, and intermarriages are common.
[18] Pampa travel is like cricket in that it defies forecast. Sometimes everything falls in right, at other times nothing comes opportunely to hand.