recollect the thrill of pleasure that went through me when in reply to my questions the Quoireng Nāgas, now quite a small tribe conterminous with the Kabuis on the north-west corner of the Manipur State, told me that they used to take heads because the possession of a head brought wealth and prosperity to the village. They added that it was usual to keep the gruesome trophy for five days, and then to return it to the village to which it belonged. Sometimes it was put in the grave of the family of the successful warrior. Then for three years all raids on the particular village were forbidden. Both they and their neighbours practise a custom which I am disposed to connect with the practice of head-hunting. They erect outside the village an image of a man, made either of straw or of the stem of a plantain tree, and throw spears at it. If a spear hits the head, the successful marksman will take a head, while, if he hits the belly of the image, the crops will be good. As Colonel M'Culloch remarks in his valuable, but alas! little-known, Account of Munnipore and its Hill Tribes, (page 52), "this festival is said to be in honour of their ancestors, but the only visible sign of this is sprinkling the graves with their particular drink." Then they take the omens for their future cultivation as "a ceremonial relic of former times." I have elsewhere[1] described the ceremony of taking the omens for the cultivation, and will only say here that it is of much interest. There are one or two points which deserve notice in this custom. The first is that the three years' truce seems to be connected with the fact that the tribes find that even good soil is exhausted by two years of jhum cultivation with fire and axe. They thus change their fields every third year.[2] The next point is that we have in the shooting rite a survival of human sacrifice, so that we may fairly consider ourselves face to face with a
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Head-Hunting among Hill Tribes of Assam.
