evil within him. The name of
this painting, "Frighten Him On It," is identical with that of the one
used at the corresponding moment in the Night Chant.

The whole represents the den of a hibernating bear. Inside the ceremonial
hogan is thrown up a bank of earth two or three feet high, with an opening
toward the doorway. Colored earths picture bear-tracks leading in;
bear-tracks and sunlight--sun dogs--are represented at the four quarters,
and the bear himself, streaked with sunlight, in the centre. The twigs at
the entrance of the bear den represent trees, behind which bears are wont
to dig their dens in the mountain side. Everything tends to make the
patient think of bears. He enters midst deep silence and takes his seat
upon the pictured animal. The play of his imagination has barely begun
when a man, painted and garbed as a bear, rushes in, uttering hideous
snarls and growls, in which all assembled join. Women patients seldom fail
to faint.

The figures shown in the dry-paintings are conventionalized
representations of the characters in Navaho mythology and of incidents in
the myth. With how many such paintings the Navaho medicine-men are
familiar is an unanswered question; but more than sixty have been noted,
some of them most elaborate. In making them, the ground within the
ceremonial hogan is evenly covered with fine brown earth, upon which the
figures are drawn with fine sands and earths of many colors allowed to
flow between the thumb and the first two fingers. The Navaho become so
skilled in this work that they can draw a line as fine as a broad pencil
mark. Many of the paintings are comparatively small, perhaps not more than
four feet in diameter; others are as large as the hogan permits, sometimes
twenty-four feet across. To make such a large painting requires the
assistance of all the men who can conveniently work at it from early
morning until mid-afternoon.

The most elaborate ceremonies are conducted between the first frost of
autumn and the second moon following the winter solstice. While primarily
designed to restore the health of an individual, they are intended also to
benefit the entire tribe, many of the prayers being offered for the
general welfare of the people rather than for the patient under immediate
treatment. Nor, so far as the individual is concerned, is the ceremony
designed necessarily for the cure of an acute ailment, but is