the head from the body, they adorned it with all the trinkets they could muster and set it up on a scaffold in the lodge. Next day pipes were lit and tobacco smoke blown into the nostrils of the dead bear, and the trader was invited to pay this mark of respect to the animal as an atonement for having taken her life. Before they feasted on the bear’s flesh, an orator made a speech in which he deplored the sad necessity under which they laboured of destroying their friends the bears; for how otherwise could they subsist?(655) Some of the Indians of the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the north-western coast of America, used to mark the skins of bears, otters, and other animals with four red crosses in a line, by way of propitiating the spirit of the beast they had killed.(656) When the Thompson Indians of British Columbia were about to hunt bears, they would sometimes address the animal and ask it to come and be shot. They prayed the grisly bear not to be angry with the hunter, nor to fight him, but rather to have pity on him and to deliver himself up to his mercies. The man who intended to hunt the grisly bear had to be chaste for some time before he set out on his dangerous adventure. When he had killed a bear, he and his companions painted their faces in alternate perpendicular stripes of black and red, and sang the bear song. Sometimes the hunter also prayed, thanking the beast for letting itself be killed so easily, and begging that its mate might share the same fate. After they had eaten the flesh of the bear’s head, they tied the skull to the top of a small tree, as high as they could reach, and left it there. Having done so, they painted their faces with alternate stripes of red and black as before; for if they failed to observe this ceremony, the bears would be offended, and the hunters would not be able to kill any more. To place the heads of bears or any large beasts on trees or stones was a mark of respect to the animals.(657) The Lillooet and Shuswap Indians of the same region used to observe similar ceremonies at the killing of a bear.(658)