Cucuduri is the name of the master of the deer and the fish.  He also makes rain and he is heard in the thunder.  He is a small but thick-set man, and in foggy weather he rides on a deer over the mountain-tops.  When there is much fog and rain, a Tepehuane may go to a wrestling-contest with Cucuduri in the forest.  He throws an arrow on the ground, and the little man appears and agrees to put up a deer against the arrow.  They wrestle, and often Cucuduri is thrown, although he is strong.  Then the man will find a deer close by, and shoot it.

The fisherman hears in the ripple of the flowing water the weeping of Cucuduri, and throws three small fish to him.  If he should not do this, he would catch nothing.  Cucuduri would throw stones into the water and drive the fish off, or he would even throw stones at the man himself.

The Tepehuanes never drink direct from a brook, but scoop up the water with their hands, else in the night the master of the spring might carry them inside of the mountain.

They never cut their finger and toe nails, for fear of getting blind.

They say that the seat of the soul is between the stomach and the chest, and they never wake up a man who is asleep, as his soul may be wandering about.  Sometimes a man is ill because his soul is away.  The doctors may be unable to make it come back, and still the man lives.  Soul is breath; and when a man dies, his soul passes through the fontanels of the head, or through the eyes or the nostrils or the mouth.

If anyone steps over a man, the latter will not be able to kill another deer in his life.  A woman can be passed in this way without such danger.

When the wind blows hard, it is because a woman delayed curing herself.

The reason the Tepehuanes make four feasts to despatch a dead woman from this world, and only three for a man, is their belief that a woman has more ribs than a man.

Unmarried women are not allowed to eat meat from the spinal column of the deer, as those bones look like arrows.  If they ate this meat, their backs would grow curved and they would have back-aches.

The Tepehuanes do not eat pinole with meat, because their teeth would fall out.  After eating pinole they rinse their mouths.

One kind of squirrel is thought to change into a bat, another into a parrot.  The ground-squirrel changes into a serpent.  Catfish become otters, and larvae on the madrona-tree are transformed into doves.

When a hen crows, an accident is going to happen, unless the hen is immediately killed.

The moon sometimes has to fight with the sun.  If weather depended only on the moon, it would rain always, for the benefit of the Tepehuanes.

The Pleiades are women, and the women of this world are their sisters.  They were living with a man who used to bring them their food.  One day he could not find anything, and drew blood from the calf of his leg, and brought it in a leaf from the big-leaved oak-tree.  He told the women it was deer-blood, and thus he sustained them.  On discovering that it was his blood, they became very angry and ascended to heaven, where they are yet to be seen.