Note (return) — LECTURE XVII

Unfortunately, however, an adept in the black art can work his fell purpose even without any personal relic of his victim. In the Banks' Islands, for example, he need only procure a bit of human bone or a fragment of some lethal weapon, it may be a splinter of a club or a chip of an arrow, which has killed somebody. This he wraps up in the proper leaves, recites over it the appropriate charm, and plants it secretly in the path along which his intended victim is expected to pass. The ghost of the man who owned the bone in his life or perished by the club or the arrow, is now lurking like a lion in the path; and if the poor fellow strolls along it thinking no evil, the ghost will spring at him and strike him with disease. The charm is perfectly efficient if the man does come along the path, but clearly it misses fire if he does not. To remedy this defect in the apparatus a sorcerer sometimes has recourse to a portable instrument, a sort of pocket pistol, which in the Banks' Islands is known as a ghost-shooter. It is a bamboo tube, loaded not with powder and shot, but with a dead man's bone and other magical ingredients, over which the necessary spell has been crooned. Armed with this deadly weapon the sorcerer has only to step up to his unsuspecting enemy, whip out the pocket pistol, uncork the muzzle by removing his thumb from the orifice, and present it at the victim; the fatal discharge follows in an instant and the man drops to the ground. The ghost in the pistol has done his work. Sometimes, however, an accident happens. The marksman misses his victim and hits somebody else. This occurred, for example, not very many years ago in the island of Mota. A man named Isvitag was waiting with his ghost-shooter to pop at his enemy, but in his nervous excitement he let fly too soon, just as a woman with a child on her hip stepped across the path. The shot, or rather the ghost, hit the child point-blank, and it was his sister's child, his own next of kin! You may imagine the distress of the affectionate uncle at this deplorable miscarriage. To prevent inflammation of the wound he, with great presence of mind, plunged his pocket pistol in water, and this timely remedy proved so efficacious that the child took no hurt.622