Palraiyuk

Also Known As: also written Palriayuk and Paalraayak; recorded by Edward Nelson as Păl-raí-yûk
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Inuit Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: A six-legged, horned, fur-covered ambush predator that lies submerged in shallow water and carries the parts of its human prey in several separate stomachs.
Role in Mythos: One of Raven’s creations, set in the lakes, creeks and marshes between the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers to take anyone careless at the water’s edge.
Relation to Humans: It hunted people who came down to fetch water and struck at boats that entered its stretch of marsh, which turned an ordinary errand into a calculation about how long to stand still. Yup’ik artists painted its likeness along umiak hulls, kayak bottoms, paddle blades and the inside curves of wooden dishes, an image read both as a ward against the thing and as a courtesy asking it for safe passage.

The grass at the edge of a delta lake stands still, and none of it bends. That was the whole difficulty. Something as long as a boat could be lying in that grass with its weight resting on the stems and not a blade pressed flat, and the woman walking down with a bucket would learn about it only when the water moved.

Between the Yukon and the Kuskokwim, in country that is mostly water pretending to be land, Yup’ik storytellers described the palraiyuk to Edward Nelson. Nelson was a young naturalist stationed at St Michael in the late 1870s, collecting objects and stories for the Smithsonian across a delta he crossed by dog sled, and what he wrote down eventually filled the eighteenth annual report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. On the page the palraiyuk looks, to a nineteenth-century American eye, uncomfortably like an alligator. It is not one.

The world the creature belonged to was warmer than the one Nelson travelled through. The tellings put it in an older delta, when the winters ran short, when the snow was off the ground and the birds were back by February, and when the creeks and the standing marsh water reached further across the flats than they do now. The palraiyuk was thickest around the Kuskokwim. It ate people and it ate animals and it seems not to have distinguished much between them.

Start with the legs, because everything else follows from them. There are six. A long pair at the back, a short pair at the front, and between them a small middle pair that hangs down off the belly without quite reaching the ground, the way an extra thought hangs off the end of a sentence. The head is long and narrow, the eyes small and set well forward. Two horns rise from the skull, sweep out and forward, then curl back on themselves. And the whole animal is furred, not scaled: fine, dense, very dark hair lying close over the body and growing longest across the feet, closer to the coat of a shrew than to anything that belongs in a river. The people who described it reached in two directions at once for a comparison, sometimes toward the crocodile, which it matched in shape and in habit, and sometimes toward the muskox.

It survives best in paint. Along the flank of an umiak, on the underside of a kayak, down the blade of a paddle, around the inner curve of a wooden dish, the palraiyuk appears stretched into a long ribbon of an animal, stylised almost to a pattern. The painters then did something no photograph would allow. They opened it. Above the row of legs the body is drawn cut away, and inside the compartments are the parts of people, an arm in one, a leg in another. It carried its meals in more than one stomach, and the artists made certain nobody could miss the fact.

Raven made it. Raven made a great many things in this tradition, some of them useful, and the palraiyuk was among them, a thing built to lie submerged at the shallow margin where a person has to come eventually. Having made it, Raven went to First Man and warned him to be careful of lakes and rivers, which is either good counsel or a poor apology depending on how the story sits with you.

The hunting method needed no more than patience. It lay under the surface at the edge of the water, in the reeds, and waited for something to lean out over its own reflection.

Killing one took a crowd. A single hunter could not manage it. Men pinned the body down with logs and beat the head with clubs, working in numbers, and the accounts make it sound less like a hunt than like a job of demolition. There is one telling in which the Sky People brought a palraiyuk down and afterwards could look properly at the corpse, at the six legs and the small eyes and the dark fur longest on the feet, the closest thing the record has to an autopsy. And there is a strange reversal that comes with the death. Alive, the palraiyuk was weightless enough to rest on grass without bending it. Dead, it became so heavy that the body would settle into the soft ground and disappear unless it was propped up.

The last one died over a domestic errand. A hunter’s wife went down to a lake for water and did not come back, and the man went after the thing that had taken her and killed it. After that the stories stop producing new ones.

What continued was the painting. The images stayed on the boats into living memory, and the objects are still in cases: a Yup’ik model kayak collected in the late 1930s, now at the Hood Museum of Art, with a small palraiyuk running along the hull beside its paddler and his fish, and a set of drawings made by Iñupiat artists at Cape Prince of Wales in 1892 and 1893 that put the same long-toothed shape in the water among the more ordinary monsters. Museum labels read the practice two ways, as protection against the creature and as an acknowledgement offered to it, a way of saying that the hunter passing overhead meant nothing by it and would like to keep going.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Palraiyuk?

The Palraiyuk is a monster from Yup’ik tradition in western Alaska, described as a long reptilian creature with six legs, horns, dark fur and several stomachs. It lay submerged in lakes, creeks and marshes and attacked people and boats at the water’s edge. Stories about it were recorded by the naturalist Edward Nelson and published in the Bureau of American Ethnology’s eighteenth annual report at the end of the nineteenth century.

Where did the Palraiyuk live?

The Palraiyuk lived in the swampy country between the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers in western Alaska, and was said to be most common around the Kuskokwim. The stories place it in an older, warmer version of that landscape, when winters were shorter and the marshes and creeks were more extensive than they are today.

What does the Palraiyuk look like?

The Palraiyuk has a long, low body with a narrow head and small eyes, two horns that sweep forward and then curl back, and six legs: a long hind pair, a short front pair, and a small middle pair hanging from the belly. Its body is covered in fine, dense, very dark fur that is longest over the feet. Descriptions compare it both to a crocodile and to a muskox.

Why is the Palraiyuk painted on Yup’ik kayaks and bowls?

Yup’ik artists painted the Palraiyuk on umiak hulls, kayak bottoms, paddles and the interiors of wooden dishes, often with the body drawn cut away to show human limbs inside its stomachs. The images have been read as a ward meant to keep the creature off and as an acknowledgement asking it for safe passage. Examples survive in museum collections, including a model kayak at the Hood Museum of Art collected in the late 1930s.

How was the Palraiyuk killed?

Killing a Palraiyuk took a group of hunters, who pinned the creature down with logs and smashed its head with clubs. Alive it was light enough to lie on grass without bending the stems, but once dead its body became so heavy that it would sink into the ground unless it was supported. The last one was said to have been killed by a hunter whose wife it took while she was fetching water from a lake.