Kushtaka

Frederica de Laguna, who spent five field seasons among the Yakutat Tlingit, wrote that everyone she knew had a story about a sudden encounter with a land otter, herself included. Half a century later an archaeologist surveying the west side of Dall Island heard what she took for human voices, looked up, and found eight or ten otter heads standing upright out of the water just offshore, watching her. They swim fast and hold their breath a long time, so they arrive without warning and go the same way. It is a very short distance from that to the kóoshdaa káa.

Kóoshdaa is the Lingít word for the river otter that Southeast Alaska calls the land otter, and káa is a person. Together they name the thing standing between: the land otter man. When John Swanton took down Tlingit belief at Sitka and Wrangell in 1904 he wrote it kū’cta-qā, and recorded that this apparently harmless animal was dreaded more than any other creature on the coast, for its supernatural powers, its fondness for stealing people away, for taking their senses from them and turning them into land otter men. The art historian Aldona Jonaitis puts it more bluntly: the most powerful supernatural being in the whole Tlingit universe is an animal that dens on the beach and fishes the tidepools.

The gift came from Raven. In the version Swanton was given, Raven and the land otter were friends who went halibut fishing together, and Raven told him he would live in the water as well as on the land, that his house would always stand on a point with the breeze coming from both sides, and that whenever a canoe capsized with people in it he would save them and make them his friends. The land otter man begins there. Swanton’s informant added a caution that has aged well: all Alaskans know about the land otter man, and very few tell the story of Raven correctly.

Saving and taking turn out to be one motion. A canoe comes to a man in the water and the people in it say, I am your friend, and they wear the faces of his mother, his sister, someone he has been grieving for a long time. He is cold and past arguing. They lay a mat cut from the broad part of a kelp frond over him and paddle south, stopping at place after place to take another woman aboard, until they reach a village they call Rainy Village. Ashore, they turn the canoe over on top of him so he cannot get out, and only then does he see that it is a skate.

At Rainy Village a Kiksádi man met an aunt of his who had drowned years before. She was dressed in a ground hog robe, she had two land otter husbands, and when the question of coming home was put to her she said she could not, because she had learned to think a great deal of them. That is the register of these stories. They are not chases.

There is no fixed monster body to describe, and that is the whole trick of the thing. What the tellings offer instead are tells. A drowned woman’s sons come up the beach as fine looking young men whose only peculiarity is a very long braid hanging down each back, and the braids are tails. A cradle song sung over her brother’s youngest child runs, the tail is growing, and he looks, and it is, and he cuts it off. A son brought home from the otters sits with his hands over his face and answers by whistling inward instead of speaking, and out in the canoe his mother can see the shadow of his arms but no hands holding the paddle. When one came to a night fire the men there watched its mouth fall open on large savage teeth and caught its breath, which stank of the rotten stuff off the beach that land otter men live on. They put tobacco and bullets in their mouths against it, which is what you did.

Not all of it is fatal, and some of it is close to slapstick. One haunted a spring, made everyone who came for water faint, then stripped them and left them lying in ridiculous attitudes. It dropped cones into a young man’s bucket, came back at dawn in the shape of a small man and wrestled him, threw him twice, was thrown once, and left. Another whistled around a camp all night, throwing cones down out of the dark, and announced in a strange unnatural voice that a shaman at Klukwan was dead. The men set off in the morning, met a canoe coming the other way, and learned that he was.

The defences against all this are small and oddly specific. Dog bones are the great enemy of the land otter people. When villagers near Sitka set out to catch a returned captive who had been keeping the town awake, their snare failed until they worked dog bones into the rope so that the bones would drive into his hands; he tore himself on them, sat down and screamed, and they had him. They brought his mind back by cutting his head with the same bones. The shaman spirit descended from the very first man taken is still dressed in dog skin, with dog bones hung about the apron, because a dog skin was what frightened the otters off him. A man going to stay among them soaked blue hellebore in water until it was strong and bitter and kept it beside him the whole time. To restore a land otter man to his senses you threw live coals on him, and when he fainted you cut slits in his palms and the soles of his feet and rubbed urine into them. Copper, which turns up everywhere else in Tlingit wealth and ceremony, is nowhere in the early record as a protection against these beings.

The man they snared with dog bones never ate cooked food again. He fished halibut unusually well afterwards and nobody asked him where he had learned it. Years later the other fishermen kept pressing boiled halibut on him until he took some, and it killed him.

Drowning was the worst thing that could happen to a Tlingit, and worse again if the body was never recovered. Livingston Jones, a Presbyterian missionary who spent more than twenty years on the coast, watched the Chilkat river fill with canoes after Chief Kin-da-goosh went under, hundreds of people searching for days until they found him, and he understood the arithmetic behind it. A spirit not recovered and not laid out properly was a spirit the otters could catch and drag into a hole. Swanton was told that the drowned had a country of their own below the world, and that food sent to them had to be put into the sea. The memorial potlatch existed in large part, as Sergei Kan has shown, to get some part of an ordinary dead person back into the clan.

Which is where the popular version of this creature goes wrong. It has the taken soul cancelled outright, shut out of every future life, and the Tlingit record is stranger and better than that. Robert Barazzuol, working through nineteen land otter myths for a thesis at the University of British Columbia, found that the drowned and the lost had a road home after all: they could come back as the spirits of a shaman. That was how a soul adrift got reattached to Tlingit society. The land otters stood between the living and the dead precisely because they were where a shaman learned to get past death.

The first man they took was a Kiksádi named Kāka’. The otters came for him in big canoes wearing his mother’s face and his sister’s, and because they could not hold a shape as steadily as he could hold his nerve, he kept catching the instant the canoe turned back into a skate. In the end he gave himself up to them. They renamed him Qowulka’, a word in the land otter language that now belongs to a particular halibut hook the fish are supposed to prefer above all others, and his friends fasted and hunted for him for two years. From him the Tlingit learned that the otters have shamans of their own, and a language of their own, and that they work on the mind of anyone who stays with them long enough until he turns against his own friends.

An isolated point was the right place for a shaman’s grave, and a point is exactly where a land otter dens and leaves its bones, so the two were always liable to meet. The land otter’s was the strongest spirit a shaman could take, and the way to hold it was to cut out the tongue, keep it bundled in a box, and sometimes wear it on a twisted spruce root cord. Everyone else went the other way. Laypeople did not hunt the animal and did not eat it, and the nineteenth century fur trade that finally put land otter skins into Tlingit hands was not felt to be a traditional thing. Having any part of one about you made you easier to take.

The hairy, sore covered, ape like creature that fills most modern accounts of the kushtaka comes from none of this. It comes from a manuscript called The Strangest Story Ever Told, found by Harry Colp’s widow after his death in 1950 and printed by his daughter, in which a prospector describes being run out of Thomas Bay in 1900 by things he could only call devils, neither men nor monkeys. There is not an otter in it. What the Tlingit account gives instead is quieter and much harder to shake off: something that arrives wearing the face of a person you love, at the exact moment you are too cold to think. The Tlingit elder David Katzeek described shooting a deer and then seeing his father and his brother in law at the edge of the woods, and running after them along a good trail, shouting at them to stop, and coming to himself in a thicket of devil’s club. He said it had shown him his own family. He also said it takes something out of you and leaves behind a person you were never meant to be.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Kushtaka?

The Kushtaka, or kóoshdaa káa, is the land otter man of the Tlingit of Southeast Alaska, and the name is simply the Lingít words for land otter and person put together. It appears as a person, as a river otter, or as something between the two, and it comes to people who are drowning or lost in the woods. John Swanton, who recorded Tlingit belief at Sitka and Wrangell in 1904, was told that the land otter was dreaded more than any other creature on the coast.

What does the Kushtaka do to a drowning person?

It rescues them, which in these stories is the same thing as stealing them. A canoe comes to the person in the water crewed by what look like their own relatives, they are carried to a village of the land otter people, and over time they lose their speech, grow a tail and become a land otter themselves. One recorded captive would never eat cooked food again, and cooked halibut eventually killed him.

How did Tlingit people protect themselves from the Kushtaka?

Dog bones were the great defence, described in the sources as the land otter people’s chief enemy, and a dog skin was said to have frightened them off the first man they took. A person going among them carried blue hellebore soaked strong in water, and tobacco, iron or lead held in the mouth was used against the fainting their breath caused. Restoring someone already taken involved throwing live coals on him, then cutting slits in his palms and soles and rubbing urine in. Copper, often listed today as a protection, does not appear in the early record.

Is a person taken by the Kushtaka lost forever?

Not necessarily, and the popular account gets this wrong. A person who came back from the land otters was understood to have the makings of a shaman, and Tlingit tradition holds that shamanism itself entered the world through the first man they took. Scholarship on the land otter stories has found that the drowned and the lost could be reintegrated by returning as a shaman’s spirits, which is the opposite of being cancelled.

Where does the hairy ape-like version of the Kushtaka come from?

From a prospector, not from Tlingit tradition. It traces to The Strangest Story Ever Told, a manuscript by Harry Colp published after his death in 1950, describing an encounter at Thomas Bay in 1900 with creatures the narrator calls neither men nor monkeys. Nothing in that account is otter-like, and it has no connection to the land otter people of the Tlingit record.

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Raven, Amala, Sisiutl, Thunderbird, Skookum, Urayuli, Tunghak, Palraiyuk, Qalupalik, Akhlut, Ijiraq, Sedna, Kawa-uso, Dobhar-chu, Selkie