No one disturbed the Indian dead. Their place was small, half-cleared spot, a little off from the village and at the end of the forest. When an Indian died no time was lost in hurrying the body away. While death was approaching a box was got ready. Sometimes, if they owned one, a trunk was used. The body did not lie straight and stark in the box. It was folded up,; often it was placed in the box before it really was a corpse.
When life had quite gone, the box was closed, some boards were broken from the side wall of the house, and it was taken away through the hole which was later mended so that the spirit should not remember how it got out and come bothering back. The people never went to the dead’s place except to carry another dead body there and then they would hurry back to make dreadful mourning howls in the village.
One day I went to the place of the dead to sketch. It was creepy. At first I did not know whether I could bear it or not. Bones lay about — human bones — skulls, staring from the eye hollows, stuck out from the bracken, ribs and thigh bones lay among the roots of the trees where coffin boxes had split. Many “dead-boxes” were bound up into the high branches of the pines. The lower limbs of the trees were chopped away.
Sometimes a Hudson’s Bay blanket would be bound around the box, and flapped in the wind as the tree rocked the box. Up there in the keen air, the body disintegrated quickly. The sun and the rain rotted the ropes that bound the box to the tree. They broke and the bones were flung to earth where greenery soon hid them.
It was beautiful how the sea air and sun hurried to help the corpses through their horror. The poor, frail boxes could keep the elements out; they were quick to make the bones clean and white.
Sometimes Indians used the hollow boles of ancient cedar trees as grave holes, though life was still racing through the cedar outer shell. In one of these hollow trees the Indians had lately buried a young woman. They had put her in a trunk. There was a scarlet blanket over top. Scattered upon that were some beads and bracelets. There was a brass lamp and her clothes, too. The sun streamed in through the split in the side of the tree nd sparkled on her dear things.
This young woman lay at the very heart of the living cedar tree. As I stood looking, suddenly twigs crackled and bracken shivered behind me. My thought went dry and my forehead wet — but it was only Indian dogs.
Up behind he Toxis the forest climbed a steep hill and here in the woods was one lonely grave, that of “our only professed Christian Indian,” according to the Missionaries. The Missionaries had coffined him tight and carried him up the new-made trail wih quite difficulty. They put him into the earth among the roots of trees, away from all his people , aay from the rain and the sun and the wind which he had loved and which would have rushed to help his body melt quickly into the dust to make earth richer because this man lived.
