most important part of the kasa tavori is held on the third day. On this day the dead’s souls are moved from the panyo into large human looking wooden figures made to be about the size of the deceased, called mugdeh. These mugdeh are moved into a dog sled that will be used to transport them to the underworld, Buni. Before leaving for Buni the shaman communicates any last wills of the deceased to the gathered family. For example in the anthropologist Gaer’s account of this ritual, one soul asked his family to repay a debt to a neighbor that the deceased was never able to repay. After this ceremony the shaman leads the dog sleds on the dangerous journey to Buni, from where she must leave before sunset or else she will die. After kasa tavori it has previously been practiced that the living relatives could no longer visit the graves of the deceased, or even talk about them. The souls of Nanai infants do not behave in the same manner as an adult’s. For the Nanai, children under a year old are not yet people, but are birds. When an infant dies, its soul will turn into a bird and fly off. When an infant dies they are not buried. Instead they are wrapped in a paper made of birch bark and placed in a large tree somewhere in the forest. The soul of the child, or the bird, is then free to enter back into a woman. It is common practice in preparing a funeral rite of an infant to mark it with coal, such as drawing a bracelet around the wrist. If a child is later born to a woman that has similar markings to those drawn on a deceased child then it is believed to be the same soul reborn. The deceased were normally buried in the ground with the exception of children who died prior to the first birthday; these are buried in tree branches as a "wind burial". Many Nanai are also Tibetan Buddhist. Modern population Russia In Russia the Nanai live on the Sea of Okhotsk, on the Amur River, downstream from Khabarovsk, on both sides of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, as well as on the banks of the Ussuri and the Girin rivers (the Samagirs). The Russians formerly called them Goldi, after a Nanai clan name. According to the 2002 census, there were 12,160