Tsul ‘Kalu

Before daylight the stranger was gone, and where he had been there was a deer lying at the door of the âsï, freshly killed. The girl dragged it inside to her mother and told her it was a present from her new sweetheart. They had deer steaks for breakfast. That was the whole of the courtship at the start: a voice in the dark, a claim to be a great hunter, and meat on the ground before sunrise.

Her mother had been clear about the requirements. A widow at Känuga, an old Cherokee town on the Pigeon River, needed a son-in-law who could keep meat in the house through the cold months, and the girl had complained that such a man was hard to come by. Then he arrived, and came back the next night with two deer, and after that most nights with something, and never once stayed past dawn.

So the old woman pushed. She said aloud that she wished her daughter’s husband would bring some firewood. He heard her. He heard everything said about him, wherever he happened to be standing at the time, and in the morning there were whole trees laid across the front of the house, roots and branches and all, far too heavy to split and impossible to walk around. She complained about that as well. The following morning the trees were gone and there was no wood at all, and she went out and gathered her own.

Then she asked to see him.

He told the girl it could not be done, that the sight of him would frighten her mother. The girl cried until he gave in, on one condition: the old woman must not call him usga’së’ti’yu, frightful. He stayed in the âsï past sunrise. The mother put her head through the doorway and found a giant folded into a room built for two, his head jammed against the rafters in the far corner and his toes scraping the roof by the door, his eyes long and slanting in his head. She got one look, ran, and screamed the single word she had been told not to say.

His name records that one feature and nothing else. Tsul’kälû’ means he has them slanting. The Cherokee word for eye is not in it anywhere; the hearer is left to supply the eyes.

Whether he was one of a kind is not settled. James Wafford, born in Georgia in 1806, told the ethnographer James Mooney that his grandmother had heard from the old people about a party of giants who once came to visit the Cherokee, nearly twice the height of ordinary men, with their eyes set slanting in their heads. The Cherokee called them Tsunil’kälû’, the Slant-eyed people, because they looked like the giant hunter. They said they lived very far off in the direction the sun goes down. They were received as friends, stayed a while, and went home.

He untwisted himself, came out of the âsï, and told his wife that her mother would never see him again. Then he went off toward Tsunegûñ’yï, his own country up in the mountains.

What follows is the strangest turn in the story and the part most retellings drop. Soon after he left, the girl bled heavily, and her mother threw what came away into the river. One night his voice was at the door again, asking where the child was. There had been no child, the girl said. He asked where the blood had gone, and she told him the place. He went down and found a small worm in the water, and carried it back, and as he walked it grew and took shape, so that by the time he reached the âsï he was holding a baby girl. He handed her over and said that since his wife’s mother disliked him and had thrown their daughter away, the two of them should come home with him. They went.

The girl had an older brother living in another settlement, and when he came to visit and found the house empty he set out after them. The tracks of a giant are not hard to follow. He reached the place where they had first rested, and there were marks on the ground where a child had been born. At the next resting place there were the tracks of a baby crawling and another lying still. At the next, one child walking and one crawling. At the next, one running and one walking. Higher up, where they had stopped again, the prints of two children running everywhere, and those prints are still in the rock.

Then the trail climbed the slope of Tsunegûñ’yï, and he heard a drum, and voices, and a great many feet dancing somewhere inside the mountain. There was an opening in the rock like a doorway, but the face below it was too steep and too smooth to climb, so he hung on the lip of it and looked over and saw heads and shoulders turning in the dark. His sister was among them. She came down to him without any trouble, leading two small children by the hand, and talked with him a long while, and did not invite him in.

He went back several times across four years, and every time she met him outside. At last she brought him through the doorway. Inside it was like standing in a townhouse, and the place seemed empty. She called out that her brother wanted to see her husband, and a voice came out of the air. Not until you put on a new dress. Go home, it said, and tell your people to go into the townhouse and fast seven days, and not leave it, and not raise the war whoop, and on the seventh day I will bring the new dresses and you will all see me.

They did it, every one of them, except a man from another settlement who slipped out in the dark each night to eat and slipped back in unnoticed. On the seventh morning, with the sun just clearing the ridge, they heard a noise like boulders coming down the side of Tsunegûñ’yï. It grew into a roar. Nobody in the townhouse breathed except the man who had been cheating, who lost his nerve, ran outside and gave the war cry. The roar stopped. Then it began again, going the other way, farther and farther off, until it died somewhere up on the mountain. They came out into a morning that looked exactly like the one seven days before. When the brother went back to complain, the voice told him the position plainly. I came with them, and you broke the fast and raised the cry. Now you can never see me.

He is not a monster. He is a landlord. Mooney, working among the Eastern Cherokee in the 1880s and 1890s, found Tsul’kälû’ listed among the powers a hunter addressed before going out, alongside the fire he read his omens from and the reed he cut his arrows from. He owned the game, all of it. Until the removals of the 1830s, hunters and priests climbed to a soapstone boulder above Caney Fork Creek and left offerings there, asking him for a good season.

The boulder is still above the creek, crowded with more than a thousand carved cupules, rings, lines and tracks, cut and recut across something like twelve centuries. The Cherokee explanation is that he came down off his mountain fields in a single jump and put out a hand to steady himself on landing, and the marks are what he left in stone that was still soft. Around it a whole map carries his anglicized name: Judaculla Ridge, the Old Fields on Tanasee Bald where a hundred acres of clearing is said to be his farm, the granite dome where he is supposed to have caught sight of his own reflection, and Cullowhee itself, which Cherokee Studies researchers read as a worn-down Judaculla-whee, his place. A rock on the Tuckasegee once held the print of the giant and of a deer, at a spot whose name meant where the footprint is. Railroad builders destroyed it.

His powers and his limits are the same thing looked at from two sides. He hears what is said of him. He gives meat without asking anything back, and the drying poles his in-laws found loaded with fresh deer were a gift rather than a trade. He can put a doorway in a cliff face and a townhouse inside a mountain. But he binds himself to the terms he offers and then keeps them exactly, which means that anybody can lose him by failing to keep theirs. One frightened word, one man who could not go a week without eating, and the door closed for good. Nothing in the story suggests he was even angry the second time. He stated the position and stopped speaking.

He has collected passengers since. Nineteenth-century translators of the Cherokee Bible used the plural of his name for the giants of Genesis, which handed Cherokee readers a local set of shoulders on which to hang the nephilim. Twentieth-century monster hunting has tried to turn him into a Bigfoot, a claim that belongs to television rather than to anything Swimmer or John Ax told Mooney. The Eastern Band’s own cultural staff describe him differently again, as the one who looked after the water and the plants and the animals of these mountains before people arrived, and who taught the Cherokee how to live here before he went. Their phrase for him is the first forest ranger.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tsul ‘Kalu in Cherokee tradition?

Tsul ‘Kalu is the Cherokee lord of the game, a giant who owns the animals of the southern Appalachian mountains. Cherokee hunters named him in their formulas and prayers before going out, alongside the fire and the reed. He is also the giant husband in one of the best-known Cherokee stories, recorded from Swimmer and John Ax by James Mooney.

What does the name Tsul ‘Kalu mean?

Tsul ‘Kalu means “he has them slanting,” understood as a reference to his eyes, although the Cherokee word for eye is not part of the name. English speakers anglicized it as Judaculla or Jutaculla. The plural form, Tsunil’kälû’, means “the Slant-eyed people” and names a race of giants said to have visited the Cherokee from the far west.

What is Judaculla Rock and how is it connected to Tsul ‘Kalu?

Judaculla Rock is a soapstone boulder above Caney Fork Creek in Jackson County, North Carolina, covered with more than a thousand carved cupules, rings, lines and tracks. Cherokee tradition holds that the marks were left when Tsul ‘Kalu leapt down from his mountain fields and put out a hand to steady himself on landing. Until the removals of the 1830s, hunters and priests left offerings at the rock before going after game.

How did Tsul ‘Kalu’s marriage end?

His mother-in-law broke the single condition he set. She was allowed to look at him provided she did not call him frightful; she looked, panicked, and shouted the forbidden word, so he went back to his mountain. He later took his wife and daughter home with him, and after one man broke a seven-day fast he told his wife’s brother that no one would ever see him again.

Is Tsul ‘Kalu the same as Bigfoot?

No. Tsul ‘Kalu is a Cherokee deity of the hunt, recorded in nineteenth-century ethnography and invoked in hunting ritual. The identification with Bigfoot comes from modern monster-hunting television and popular writing, and has no basis in the Cherokee accounts Mooney collected.

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