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On the upper part of the island, above reach of high water, the burial hut loomed dark and still in the moonlight as the chief approached it. Some of the Willamettes, like the Chinooks, practised canoe burial, but the greater part laid their dead in huts, as did also the Klickitats and the Cascades. The war-chief entered the hut. The rude boards that covered the roof were broken and decayed.
Mingled with the debased tribes that made up the larger part of the gathering, Cecil saw here and there warriors of a bolder and superior race, Yakimas and Klickitats, clad in skins or wrapped in blankets woven of the wool of the mountain sheep.
They had not advanced far into the wood ere the whole train came to a sudden halt. Riding forward, Cecil found a band of horsemen awaiting them. They were Klickitats, mounted on good ponies; neither women nor pack-horses were with them; they were armed and painted, and their stern and menacing aspect was more like that of men who were on the war-trail than of men who were riding to a "peace-talk."
It comprised also the Okanogans, who disposed of their dead by tying them upright to a tree; the Yakimas, who buried them under cairns of stone; the Klickitats, who swathed them like mummies and laid them in low, rude huts on the mimaluse, or "death islands" of the Columbia; the Chinooks, who stretched them in canoes with paddles and fishing implements by their side; and the Kalamaths, who burned them with the maddest saturnalia of dancing, howling, and leaping through the flames of the funeral pyre.
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