Nowadays the Nootka live in small frame houses, a family, in our narrower sense of the word, to a house. It was not so when Tom was young. The village of Hikwis, in which he was raised, consisted of a row of long plank houses, each constructed on a heavy quadrangular frame of posts, which were the trimmed trunks of cedars, and of crossbeams of circular section resting on the posts. The roofing and walls were of cedar planks, running lengthwise of the house. The floor was the bare earth, stamped smooth, and a slightly raised platform ran along the rear and the long sides of the house. On the inner floor one or more fires were built, the smoke escaping through openings in the roof, provided by merely shoving a roofing plank or two to a side. Tom early learned not to stand erect in the house any more than he could help. The smoke circulating in the upper reaches of the house, particularly in rainy weather when the smoke-hole rafters were closed, was trying to the eyes, and people found it convenient to sit or crouch on the floor as much as possible. Some of the houses, like the one in which Tom was brought up, had paintings or carvings referring to the crests or legendary escutcheons of the chief of the tribe, tribal subdivision, or house group. In Tom’s house the main escutcheons were two Thunder-birds, face to face, painted on the outside of the wall planks; a series of round holes cut in the roof, and one in front that served as a door, all representing moons; and paintings of wolves on the boards that ran below the platforms. The chief of the house group, together with his immediate family, occupied the rear of the house; other families of lesser rank, kin to the chief by junior lines of descent, occupied various positions along the sides. Slaves were also housed in the long communal dwelling. They were not, like the middle class, undistinguished relations of the chief’s families, but strangers, captured in war or bartered off like any chattels. The mat beds of the individual families were made on the platforms and were screened off from one another as required.