[Illustration: PYRAMID HARBOR, CHILKAT INLET. (Chilkat Indian Canoe in the foreground.)]
Some of these houses are quite respectable for savage house-making, the great thick puncheon planks of the floor being often quite well polished, or at any rate neatly covered with white sand. Attempts at civilization are made in the larger and more aristocratic abodes by partitioning the huge hovel into rooms by means of draperies of cloth or canvas. In some the door is made as high as it can be cut in the wall and is reached by steps from the outside, while a similar flight inside gives access to the floor. The fire occupies the center of the room, enough of the floor being removed to allow it to be kindled directly on the ground, the smoke escaping by a huge hole in the roof. The vast majority of the houses are squalid beyond measure, and the dense resinous smoke of the spruce and pine blackens the walls with a funereal tinge, and fills the house with an odor which, when mingled with that of decayed salmon, makes one feel like leaving his card at the door and passing on. It takes no stretch of the imagination to conceive that such architecture provides the maximum of ventilation when least needed, and it is a fact that the winter hours of the Chilkats are cold and cheerless in the extreme. They sit crouched around the fire with their blankets closely folded about them and even drawn over their heads, the house serving indeed as a protection from the fierce wind and deep snow drifts, but no more. They look on all this foolishness, however, with a sort of Spartan fortitude as necessary to toughen them and inure them to the rough climate, and at times, impelled by this belief, they will deliberately expose themselves with that object in view. When the rivers and lakes are frozen over the men and boys break great holes in the ice and plunge in for a limited swim, then come out, and if a bank of soft snow is convenient roll around in it like so many polar bears; and when they get so cold that they can't tell the truth they wander leisurely back to the houses and remark that they have had a nice time, and believe they have done something toward making themselves robust Chilkat citizens able to endure every thing. There is no wonder that such people adopt cremation; and in fact one interpretation of its religious significance is based on the idea of future personal warmth in the happy hunting grounds, which they regard as a large island, whose shores are unattainable except by those whose bodies have been duly consumed by fire. Unless the rite of cremation has been performed the unhappy shade shivers perpetually in outer frost. It is the impossibility of cremation which makes death by drowning so terrible to a Chilkat.