58 THE YUROK. 
artistic of the two, was made by an old Indian of the Quilshpak Ranch, to 
celebrate his triumph over a 'Tolowa. 
They trim up trees for assembly-chamber fuel in the same curious way 
as the Karok, and I have seen hundreds of trees thus fashioned along the 
Klamath, representing a man’s head and arms. The Yurok say they are 
intended merely as guide-posts for the squaws, to direct them to the villages 
when they have been out in the mountains berrying; but they have a 
deeper significance than that. 
They also have a curious custom of dropping twigs and boughs at the 
junction of trails, which sometimes accumulate in heaps several feet high, 
like the nests of wood-rats. very Indian who passes deposits a twig on 
the pile, but without observing any method that a white man can discover. 
No one will explain the custom, but they laugh the matter off when it is 
broached; though it is probably observed, like so many other things, merely 
“for luck”. 
In saluting each other, the Yurok say ai-yu-kwoi’ (friendship), without 
hand-shaking or any further ceremony. With slight variations, this expres- 
sion prevails among several tribes of Northwestern California who speak 
entirely different languages. 
They bury the dead in a recumbent posture, and observe about the 
same usages of mourning as the Karok. After a death they keep a fire 
burning certain nights in the vicinity of the grave. They hold and believe, 
at least the ‘Big Indians” do, that the spirits of the departed are compelled 
to cross an extremely attenuated greased pole, which bridges over the chasm 
of the ““Debatable Land”, and that they require the fire to light them on 
their darksome journey. <A righteous soul traverses the pole quicker than 
a wicked one; hence they regulate the number of nights for burning a 
light according to the character for goodness or the opposite which the 
deceased possessed in this world. If this greased pole were perpendicular, 
like the Mdt de Cocagne in the frolics of the Champs Elysées, I should 
account this an Indian parallel to the Teutonic myth of Jack and the 
Beanstalk. But they appear to think it is horizontal, leading over bridge- 
wise to the Happy Western Land beyond the ocean, which gives it more 
resemblance to the Mohammedan fable of Al Sirat. . 
