Then the tiger set out to search for his wife and asked everyone he met whether they had seen her pass. All replied that they had not seen her, till at last he came to the sangalia creeper, who said she had just gone by that way. Then he chased and chased her till he came up with her at dusk at the door of her parents’ house. The woman cried out, “Mother, come out of the inner room and open the door for me.” But her mother replied, “Who is that? I have no daughter. My daughter disappeared long ago,” and would not come out and open the door. Then the woman said again, “I am your own daughter, mother, whom years ago, when I was little, you hit on the head with the pigs’ food ladle. Do you not know me now?” With these words she began to squeeze through the little opening by the door left for the dogs, but the tiger seized her legs while her mother seized her head and shoulders. And they pulled and pulled till she was torn in two and the tiger was left with her lower half and her mother with the upper half. Then the tiger took his half to his house and kept watch over it with a whisk so that not a single fly should settle on it, and buried it. And he wept, saying, “O my wife, when you were alive I loved you so much that I was careful always to give you good meat to eat as relish with your rice. You never had to eat leaves and such-like poor fare.” But her mother said, “Why do you weep so? We have torn her in half. Now we will cook and eat her.” And she cooked a little of the flesh from the upper half of the girl and offered it to the tiger, who refused it, saying, “How can I eat the flesh of the mother of my daughter?” But at last he ate it. Then he said, “Human flesh is good,” and went and dug up the portion he had buried and ate that too. That is how the tiger came to eat human flesh, and that is why to this day tigers sometimes kill and devour men. The ordinary Lhota believes the founders of the tribe came out of the earth, and does not worry his head as to how they originated in the world below. The following story, however, is an example of the widely spread myth that the world was populated by the offspring of a brother and sister. [215] Lankongrhoni and the Villagers.