This arises from the family belief that some one individual of the
species is their nearest friend, to kill whom would be a great
crime, and to be carefully avoided. Similarly, a native who has a
vegetable for his _kobong_ may not gather it under certain
circumstances, and at a particular period of the year." Here it will
be observed that though each man spares all the animals or plants of
the species, they are not all equally precious to him; far from it,
out of the whole species there is only one which is specially dear
to him; but as he does not know which the dear one is, he is obliged
to spare them all from fear of injuring the one. Again, this
explanation of the clan totem harmonises with the supposed effect of
killing one of the totem species. "One day one of the blacks killed
a crow. Three or four days afterwards a Boortwa (crow) [_i.e._ a man
of the Crow clan] named Larry died. He had been ailing for some
days, but the killing of his _wingong_ [totem] hastened his death."
Here the killing of the crow caused the death of a man of the Crow
clan, exactly as, in the case of the sex-totems, the killing of a
bat causes the death of a Bat-man or the killing of an owl causes
the death of an Owl-woman.
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