206 THE KABINAPER. 
to see it, but the sides and bottom of Kelsey Creek were yet strewn and 
malodorous with fish that had perished by reason of the crowding. 
The Kabinapek language is extremely rugged, hirsute, and guttural, so 
that I was deterred from doing anything beyond getting a meager vocabu- 
lary; and even these few words were very difficult to spell. ‘That it is an 
offshoot of the Pomo is clearly proven by the fact that it possesses in 
common with it a few such words of hourly occurrence as “water”, “dog”, 
“deer”, ete. But the numerals are changed beyond all recognition. The 
personal pronouns are radically the same, but have been gutturalized by 
these mountaineer fish-eaters. 
There is presented in this tribe an interesting but unanswerable inquiry. 
As the Kabinapek and the other villages are descended from the Pomos, 
their language must once have been identical with that spoken on Russian 
River. Let us suppose that the parent language had 3,000 words. At 
this day, so widely have the two resultant languages departed from the 
original that, judging from the limited vocabularies I took, they have not 
above 100 in common. How long would it take each of them to change 
1,500 words beyond the recognition of the other? It must have taken 
many hundreds, if not thousands, of years. 
About the only act which can be considered religious is the pu-¢-si, 
“raising the dead”. It is the same as the custom which prevails on the east 
side, and will be described in speaking of that people. 
Like all California Indians, these are extremely sensual. In the 
spring when the wild clover is lush and full of blossoms and they are eating 
it to satiety after the famine of winter, they become amorous. This season, 
therefore, is a literal Saint Valentine’s Day with them, as with the natural 
beasts and birds of the forest. 
A peculiarity of this tribe is the intense sorrow with which they mourn 
for their children when dead. Their grief is immeasurable. They not 
only burn up everything that the baby ever touched, but everything that 
they possess, so that they absolutely begin life over again—naked as they 
were born, without an article of property left. A young Indian was 
drowned at Lower Lake, and so great and bitter was the grief of his mother 
over his untimely death that she besought her friends to take away her life 
