According to stories collected from Yurok elders in the early 1900s by anthropologist T.T. Waterman, the Yurok believe that at one time supernatural beings--"the immortals"--lived throughout their land. But when the people, the Yurok, arrived, the immortals departed, except from one place, Sumeg, which today is called Patrick's Point. "This region is the abode of the last immortals," Waterman wrote in his book Yurok Geography.

And so our stories begin at this North Coast headland.

Axel Lindgren III kneels by a pile of freshly split redwood planks, which glow pinkish red. It's late afternoon here at Sumeg Village, a Yurok demonstration village at Patrick's Point State Park, 30 miles south of the mouth of the Klamath River. All around Lindgren stand examples of traditional houses, with their small rounded doors and shallow-peaked roofs, weathered to a gray-brown. Near one house is a canoe carved from a redwood log. Lindgren, who works at the park, helped build the village some 16 years ago. Today he's already shown dozens of tourists how his people had, for thousands of years, split huge trees into planks, cut the planks to size using fire, and tied them together with strips from hazel saplings.

Lindgren comes mostly from people who lived in Tsurai, a Yurok village several miles south of Patrick's Point, where the coastal town called Trinidad now stands. His great-grandmother, Eliza Lindgren, was the last Tsurai medicine woman. Along with the rest of her people, she was pushed from the village in 1916. Lindgren also has ties to Weitchpec, a Yurok village up the Klamath River a ways. As for the name Lindgren, he says that long ago a stranded Swedish sailor, left behind by his ship because he was too ill to travel, married into his Tsurai family. "There's a rock south of Tsurai, on dry sand, that they call 'Charlie Lindgren Rock,' because he would go out and stand on that rock to see if he could see his ship go by." Down at what is now called Luffenholtz Beach there's another rock, where the Lindgren family fished. "It was primarily our rock," he says. After catching surf fish, "they would lay the fish over this rock to sun-dry."

And there are prayer places. "Along the coast to the west of the village of Tsurai is where girls practiced their brush dance. And there's a cave in front of Trinidad Head--I've been in there--where if you go in, and if one drop of water falls on your head, you could become a rich man. If two drops hit you, you could be trapped in there. One man did become trapped, but he was so strong, spiritually, he got out."

When he was 12, Lindgren explored the cave with another Yurok boy. They motored their boat in, the tide began to rise, and it was slower going trying to back the boat out. They made it--and no drops fell on their heads. "I'm still working for a living," Lindgren says, wryly.

All his stories seem to involve the ocean. "The ocean, to me, would signify life. The ocean provides not only food, but regalia--mussels, mussel shells, abalone shells--for myself, my brother, my family. We still go out and get the salmon. We get the bottom fish, we get the surf fish--both the day fish and the night fish."

Another story: Abalone Girl met Canada Goose Man. They married and had many children. But things started to unravel. Canada Goose Man would go out and hunt up all sorts of treats for Abalone Girl to eat, which she rejected. She didn't like that goose food. She ate seaweed and only wanted seaweed. So they split up, and Canada Goose Man moved south. And every fall, the kids all go south to visit him--which explains all that honking in the air.

"Also, the ocean can provide a redwood log that washes in." It might become a canoe, or skewers for roasting salmon steaks, or planks for a house.

Up until 150 years ago, just before the main influx of European Americans--seeking gold, otters, and more--had begun on the North Coast, the Yurok and other northwestern California tribes were among the richest of societies. Among other things, the Yurok thrived on salmon and other fish from the Klamath River and the ocean--although when they fished from the sea they usually kept close to the river's mouth or ventured not far from the shore in their dugout canoes.

Today the Yurok Tribe is the largest in California, with almost 5,000 members. It is also among the poorest. More than 70 percent of the Yurok population lives without telephones or electricity, and more than 80 percent lives below the poverty line. But the Yurok culture never died. Today the tribe employs 200 people in its substantial government, many of them in the fisheries department. Many tribal members still fish for a subsistence living, down at the mouth and up along the river.

The Yuroks' ancestral territory included Sumeg and extended south to Little River, just below Trinidad, and north to Wilson Creek (where Tolowa territory begins and heads north) in what is now Del Norte County. Today, the Yurok reservation's 65,035 acres is contained within a roughly two-mile-wide and 44-mile-long stretch of the Klamath River, from where the river meets the sea at Requa inland to Weitchpec, where the Trinity River converges with the Klamath. Some members also live on rancherias up and down the coast; some live in towns. The tribe's headquarters are in Klamath, not far from the mouth of the river.

These days, Sumeg is left generally to the immortals and tourists--except on ceremonial occasions, when Yurok tribal members re-enact their dances and demonstrate their way of cooking, building, and worshiping.

On this particular afternoon in late summer, after the Sumeg Village Day at Patrick's Point, while Lindgren wanders the grounds, several other Yurok citizens linger near the picnic area, talking.