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This is done within a few hours after death has occurred. The third night, a bowl containing some food, a prayer-stick offering, and a feather and string, are carried to the grave. The string is placed so that it points from the grave to the west.
At the spring they sit on the south side of the pool, and as one of the priests plays a flute the others sing, while one of their number wades into the spring, dives under water, and plants a prayer-stick in the muddy bottom. Then taking a flute he again wades into the spring and sounds it in the water to the four cardinal points.
It is said that a son of a prominent chief, disguised as a katcina, offered a prayer-stick to a maiden, and as she received it he cut her throat with a stone knife. He is said to have escaped to the mesa top and to have made his way along its edge to his own town, taunting his pursuers.
When a society made its prayers this meal, symbolic of a gift of corn, is tied in a packet and attached to two sticks, one male, the other female, with prescribed herbs and feathers. Here we have the ordinary prayer-stick, varying in details but essentially the same, a sacrifice to the gods appropriately designated by prescribed accessories.
The cemetery northwest of Awatobi, where the soil is sandy and easy to excavate, had been searched by others, and many beautiful objects of pottery taken from it. It was found that one of these prayer-sticks was laid over the heart of the deceased, and as the skeleton was in a sitting posture, with the hand on the breast, the prayer-stick may thus have been held at the time of burial.
This interpretation, however, is highly speculative, and should be accepted only with limitations. I have sometimes thought that the prayer-stick or paho may originally have represented a bird, and the use of it is an instance of the substitution of a symbolic effigy of a bird, a direct survival of the time when a bird was sacrificed to the deity addressed.
The length of the ancient Sikyatki pahos, ascribed to the Flute society, follows the same rule. Plate CLXXIV, e, f, have the same ferules referred to in the description above, but are of greater diameter. They are unlike any modern paho except in this particular. In g is depicted a still larger prayer-stick, with two serrate incisions on each side of the continuation of the flattened facet.
Deposited in this fragment were many stone arrowheads, several fragments of green paint, a flat green paho ornamented with figures of dragon-flies in black. In addition to a single complete prayer-stick there were fragments of many others too much broken to be identified. One of these was declared by Kópeli to be a chief's paho.
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