468 THE BELLA COOLA INDIANS

fancied security. He silently wakened his companions. Each stationed
himself at the crevice until at a given signal each grasped the legs of two
of the birds, thus pinioning eight in all. Unable to drag the geese through
the narrow crack, one of the lads moved his birds along so that his neigh-
bour could hold them with his own, and then went on top where he quickly
wrung the necks of all. They skinned their booty, ate the flesh raw,
and covered themselves with the plumage. The day passed without
further incident, the log continuing to drift along though no land was in
sight.

As on the preceding night the four slept inside the hollow log. At dawn
they saw that there were more birds, this time Canada geese, resting on
the trunk above their heads. The boys caught a number in the manner
already described; as before, they dined on the flesh, and clothed them-
selves with the plumage of their quarry. The following morning they
seized a number of gulls, and the next day some mallard ducks. By this
time they had provided themselves with comfortable cloaks made from
the skins of the birds.

Like its predecessors the fourth day wore away without incident, but
that night the four boys were wakened by their log pounding against
something. Looking out, they saw that it was crashing repeatedly against
a rocky shore formed of small crags of some dark substance resembling
coal; there was no beach in sight. The youngest of the four rashly jumped
immediately for the land, but, though his brothers saw him, apparently,
reach one of the rocks, he vanished as if the earth had swallowed him.
The three survivors dared not follow, but instead remained shivering and
crying inside their shelter. The log, constantly rebounding from the
precipitous shore, slowly drifted along until caught in, what seemed to
the voyagers, a whirlpool. Round and round it spun like a twig, now one
end in the air, now the other; the three lads were dizzy and feared
their last hour had come.

Though the boys did not know it, their log had been caught in the
salmon-weir of Nuskiaxek, the supernatural lord of the land of ashes.
When a fire consumes wood, mortals see only ashes remaining. This is
because Nuskiaxek swallows the substance of the wood and takes it to
his domain, which is called S‘gis‘t or Sgam#. But there is nostrength left
in that portion of the wood which he devours, hence when the youngest
of the four brothers jumped on to it he passed right through; it was
nothing more than the form of a crag. Nuskiaxek has a huge salmon-weir
in which he catches the corpses of those drowned either in the rivers or
the ocean; they serve him as food, in fact, they are his salmon. How
much of this information was known to the three boys, or how much of