While Tom and the other men, when they were not busy “potlatching” or visiting some relative, or taking a run down to Victoria, were engaged in fishing and sea mammal hunting and wood-working, the women prepared the food, dug for edible roots, gathered clams, and spent what time they could spare from these and similar tasks in the weaving and plaiting of blankets, matting, and baskets. What receptacles were not of wood were of basketry, while mats of various sorts did duty for tables, hangings, and carpeting. The materials of these baskets and mats, the omnipresent cedar bark and the rush, frayed easily, so that the women were kept constantly busy replenishing the household stock. Even now one can hardly enter a Nootka house without seeing one or more of the women twilling mats and baskets with strips of softened cedar bark or twining the cedar-bark strands into cordage and bags, or threading a rush mat with the long needles of polished spiræa. In the old days, there was always in the house a great clatter of breaking up the raw, yellow cedar bark with the corrugated bark beaters of bone of whale, and of loosening up the hard strips of red cedar bark into fibrous masses with the half-moon shredders. The women could work up the bark into almost any degree of fineness; indeed, the cedar-bark “wool” that was used to pad the cradles is almost as soft and fluffy in feel as down or cotton batting. When Tom was a boy, the women made only plain, unornamented baskets, whether twined or twilled, and ornamented the mats with sober, but effective lines of alder-dyed red and mud-dyed black. Since then, however, they have taken to making also trinket baskets and plaques of the peculiar wrapped weave, beautifully ornamented with realistic and geometrical designs in the black and white weft of grass. This art came to Tom’s people from the Nitinats or Southern Nootka, who in turn owe it to the Makah of Cape Flattery. Trade with the whites is the chief incentive in the making of these finer specimens of basketry.