With the cold
weather leaving us for a while (at least where I live), I still wanted to blog
about monsters connected to a cold section of the country—Alaska.
The first are tornits.
In the beginning, the Inuit and the tornits lived peacefully in villages near
each other, sharing common hunting grounds.
The Inuit people often built and used kayaks for hunting. While
the tornits were unable to master the building of kayaks, they became aware of
the advantages of having and using one. One tale says a young tornit borrowed a
young Inuit's kayak without permission and damaged the bottom of it. The young
Inuit grew angry and stabbed the tornit in the the neck while he slept and killed
him. The rest of the tornits fearing they would be killed by the Inuit fled the
country. Since that time, stories of hunters disappearing, later found dead and
mangled or never seen again. Apparently, hunters and the tornits no longer
peacefully shared common hunting grounds. One thing about these tornits, they
sound like Bigfoot.
The
next monster of Alaskan myth is the Tizheruk, large,
snake-like sea creatures believed to roam Alaska's waters. They are described
as having head 7 feet long, a body with a tail ending in a flipper, making them
about 12 to 15 feet long. These creatures are claimed to snatch people from
docks and piers.
The Tizheruk have some similarities to
the Haietlik, or "Lightning Snakes," occasionally associated with the
Thunderbird of Southeast Alaska and Pacific Northwest native cultures. Once the
Thunderbird spotted a killer whale, it would launch Haietlik as living weapons
by throwing them from the skies like lightning.
The Qalupalik is a creature of Inuit legend described as being
human-like and having green skin with long hair and very long fingernails. She
lives in the sea, hums to entice children to come closer to the water and wears
an amautik -- a parka worn by Inuit women
to hold a child against the back in a built-in baby pouch just below the hood.
Like the
boogeyman legends, parents and elders tell children that if they are
disobedient or wander too close to the sea shore, the Qalupalik will come
onshore, snatch and stow them in her amautik, before taking them back to the
sea with her to raise them as her own children.
Then
there’s the bloodthirsty Adlet, bearing resemblance
to the werewolf. The Inuit legend tells that the Adlet are a race of
people said to have the lower body of dogs and the upper body of humans.
Typically, they're believed to be the offspring of an Inuit woman and a dog, thanks
to an unnatural mating.
The woman gave birth to 10 children,
half of whom were dogs and the other half, Adlet. The family was sent to a
remote island because they were so voracious, and their grandfather would hunt
for them and provide them with meat. Every day, the dog-husband was supposed to
swim from the island to the mainland, where the grandfather was supposed to
fill a pair of boots wrapped around the dog's neck with meat. Eventually, the
grandfather filled the boots with rocks, drowning the husband.
Fearing for her children's lives, the
mother sent them inland, where they spawned more Adlet. The Adlet are typically
portrayed as aggressive savages who will attack men when they cross paths.
Although the Adlet legend is based in far north mythology -- a
version of the story appears in Greenland too. There the Adlet are called
Erqigdlit -- a few researchers have linked it to the European tales of the
werewolf.
The last Alaskan beastie is The Keelut is described as an evil
earth spirit that takes the form of a black, hairless dog with only hair on its
feet. It's not unlike the Black Dogs that haunt Great Britain and other parts
of the United States (like in my book, Haunted
Virginia: Legends, Myths and True Tales). It tracks travelers at night,
attacking, and then killing them. If a trail of dog paw prints are found in the
earth and they vanish, the story goes that it is considered a Keelut is nearby.
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