PERFECTED IMPLEMENT FOUND IN USE
As suggested by widespread primitive customs, and as illustrated specifically by the arrow-charming, the warfare of the Seri is largely sortilegic, this feature being but an extension and magnification of a corresponding feature of their hunting customs. The economic object of the chase is, of course, the flesh of the quarry; but the hunt normally begins with invocatory or other fiducial ceremonies, culminates in a feast opened with oblations, and ends in the use of horns or hoofs, teeth or bones, mane or tail, as talisman-trophies—primarily pledges of fealty to the favorable potencies, only secondarily symbols of success. The observances illumine the ever-present esoteric object of the chase, which is to gain the favor or overcome the power of the beast-god represented by the animal hunted; in general, this is sought to be effected through mimetic movements, or symbolic objects, associated with that animal-kind, and the retained charm-trophy is valued as a symbol of the placation or outwitting of a particular deity. Similarly, the Seri warrior strives for the supposed deific symbols of the enemy—the scalp or headdress or arrow of the alien tribesman, the fire-breathing and echo-waking (as well as death-dealing) wand of the Caucasian; and the Papago arrows, Yaqui scalps, and white man’s firearms are sought avidly, treasured as fetishes, and often carried conspicuously as badges of borrowed prowess.[309] So the Seri are never without alien insignia in the form of weapons. The day before the 1895 expedition entered their stronghold, a band of warriors and women were frightened from a freshly slaughtered cow by a party of vaqueros so suddenly that their arms were left behind—and these included a heavy Springfield “remodeled” rifle, lacking not only ammunition but breechblock and firing pin; while Don Andrés Noriega, of Costa Rica, and L. K. Thompson, of Hermosillo, described a rifle of modern make captured similarly two years before, which was in good working order and charged with a counterfeit cartridge ingeniously fashioned from raw buckskin in imitation of a center-fire brass shell and loaded with a polished stone bullet.[310] The finders opined that the rifles were carried to bluff the enemy, and even that the counterfeit cartridge was designed to do deadly execution; but it would better accord with Seri customs, and with the law of piratical acculturation which they typify,[311] to infer that the weapons were regarded rather as symbols of mystical potencies than as simple scarecrows. Of related import were two or three pseudomachetes made from rust-pitted cask hoops, reported by the majordomo and several vaqueros at Costa Rica; and of still greater significance was a machete picked up in a just-abandoned jacal by Don Ygnacio Lozania—veteran of the Andrade expedition and the Encinas conquest—which was laboriously rasped and scraped out of paloblanco wood, colored in imitation of iron blade and mahogany handle by means of face-paints, and even furnished with “eyes” replacing the handle-rivets, in the form of embedded iron scales. Some of the Seri are familiar with the normal use of firearms, as was demonstrated by the Robinson and other episodes, and many of them modernly make some use of machetes or other knives, as shown by various rudely whittled wooden artifacts; yet the burden of proof indicates that the chief use of the Caucasian’s weapons in the heat of actual warfare is shamanistic and symbolic. This interpretation is, in fact, practically established by the experience of the frontier; for the vaqueros and local soldiery have little fear of the ill-understood firearms and clumsily handled machetes occasionally seen in Seri hands, though they dread unspeakably the necromantic arrows and flesh-rending teeth with which the agile foes are credited.
The mystical potency ascribed to Caucasian firearms and cutlery by the zoomimic tribesmen is of interest as a reflection of motives and methods pervading the entire range of their activities; at the same time it suggests the genesis of the aberrant technolithic craft displayed in arrow-chipping. The information obtained from Mashém and his mates concerning chipped arrowpoints implied that the process was hieratic and little understood by the body of the tribe, its place in the tribal knowledge, indeed, being similar to that of the brewing of the arrow “poison”, which is the special work of shamans; and this information, comporting as it does with the rarity of the chipped points and the crudeness of the work, strongly supports the inference that the stone arrow-making of the Seri was originally a fetishistic mimicry of alien devices—a plane, indeed, above which the craft has hardly risen even in recent decades.
While the Seri are devoid of military tactics in the strict sense of the term, they have certain customs of warfare which seem to be scrupulously observed. These customs are closely akin to those followed in hunting the larger land animals—indeed, the warfare of the tribe is merely an intensified counterpart of their chase.
The favorite tactical device of the warriors, as indicated by the great majority of their battles, is the ambuscade, laid and sprung either with or without the aid of decoys (usually aged women). Sometimes a considerable body act in concert under a prearranged plan; more commonly a few warriors only are involved at the outset, though these may be joined as the crisis approaches by companions lurking behind rocks and shrubs to be either on hand at the finish or in the way of ready flight, according to the turn of the battle-tide; and it is probable that the greater part of the ambuscades prove stillborn by reason of the oozing courage of leaders and the shirking of their supporters if the prospective victims present a bold front, or if the final omens are otherwise adverse. The ambuscade, with its flying contingent, grades into the device of stalking a stationary or slowly moving enemy, the stealthy approach terminating either in covert attack at close range or in sudden rush by a superior force. The theory, or rather the instinctive plan, of the campaign is to seek advantage in both position and numbers, to keep under cover until the instant of attack, to have sure and ample lines of retreat, and in every way to minimize individual risk.
There is a widespread notion toward the Seri frontier that the savages are given to sorties and surprises by night; but both specific testimony and the records indicate, when carefully analyzed, that this tactical device is much less common in practice than in repute, and is not, indeed, characteristic of the tribe. A few known battles began in attacks by night; but the war parties, like the hunting and fishing parties (save in the semiceremonial pelican pilgrimages), display decided preference for daylight in their forays—indeed, there are various indications that the folk are much more timid and oppressed with superstitious fears by night than by day.
In rare cases small parties of aliens have been half openly surrounded and done to death by considerably larger parties of the savage folk; but this method, too, is incongruous with the fixed habits of the tribe and with the deep-planted instinct of avoiding personal exposure.