How, then, could they catch
it?
The Namaquas abstain from eating the flesh of hares, because they
think it would make them faint-hearted as a hare. But they eat the
flesh of the lion, or drink the blood of the leopard or lion, to get
the courage and strength of these beasts. The Bushmen will not give
their children a jackal's heart to eat, lest it should make them
timid like the jackal; but they give them a leopard's heart to eat
to make them brave like the leopard. When a Wagogo man of East
Africa kills a lion, he eats the heart in order to become brave like
a lion; but he thinks that to eat the heart of a hen would make him
timid. When a serious disease has attacked a Zulu kraal, the
medicine-man takes the bone of a very old dog, or the bone of an old
cow, bull, or other very old animal, and administers it to the
healthy as well as to the sick people, in order that they may live
to be as old as the animal of whose bone they have partaken. So to
restore the aged Aeson to youth, the witch Medea infused into his
veins a decoction of the liver of the long-lived deer and the head
of a crow that had outlived nine generations of men.
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