474 THE BELLA COOLA INDIANS

About this time Skatprs gave the following instructions to Magqwéints’s
son:

“If I should die, feel in my mouth behind my right molars and draw
from there my food. Put this into your own mouth, and, like me, you will
never be hungry for it is my good fortune,® the source of my power. If
you take it you will have the same. Then have built for me a house on
the beach in which you must lay my body on a bed. Do not enclose it in
a coffin. Watch near the house on the fourth night after my death.”

One day the foster-brother forgot to knock before entering the hunting
lodge, and forthwith the salmon-boy fell dead, to the terrible grief and
horror of the offender. Furthermore, he was greatly alarmed at the
thought of his parents’ anger when they should learn the cause of their
adopted son’s death. But he remembered his comrade’s instructions, felt
in the mouth of the corpse and drew from it an object that was cold, hard,
and round, like a bird’s egg. When he had put this into his own mouth
he felt no further need for food. He recrossed the river to the village
where he explained the death of the salmon-boy, through his own error.
On hearing the news, all the villagers bitterly lamented the loss of such
a fine young man, who had proved himself a public benefactor. Sorrow-
fully, they brought back his corpse on a platform between two lashed
canoes. Magwdnts’s son told his father of the salmon-boy’s wish to
have a house built on the beach for his body, and everyone gladly helped
in this task. Inside, they made a bed whereon they laid the body,
obedient to the instructions of the deceased, not enclosing it in a coffin.

On the fourth night Magwdnts’s boy stole away from his friends to
watch near the house in which lay his dead comrade. Presently he heard
a canoe approaching, and voices in it speaking his own language, but he
could see nothing. The craft was a salmon canoe, and the people in it
salmon people, but the watcher was ignorant of this. They were discus-
sing where the house ought to be, and when they saw it they landed. One
of them, as the concealed lad judged from the sounds, went to the door
and knocked.

“Please get up!” he said.

This he repeated four times; Skatpts obeyed the fourth summons,
emerged from the house, and went with the strangers to their canoe.
Seeing his comrade about to embark, Magqwénts’s son called out:

“Please wait. I want to go too.”

“You are sure you want to come?” asked his foster-brother.

“Yes,” responded Magwdants’s son.

“Wait a minute,” said the salmon-boy to the occupants of the canoe.

LAYS UH