ABSTRACT
The most ubiquitous legendary creature in Southeast Alaska, besides the multitudinous contemporary avatars of the creator, Raven, is the Kooshdakhaa , or land-otter man. The Kooshdakhaa is no avatar either, no half-mute descendant of the once-eloquent animal masters, punitively split for a long time now into the various Tlingit clans and the various animal species. The Kooshdakhaa persists in constitutively modern times, surviving the dispersal of the ancient gods, the silence of the animals and the disenchantment of the shamans. The Kooshdakhaa is the shape-shifting, monstrous, occasionally benevolent, death-harbinging, ongoing reassembly of otter and human parts, always more than one and less than two, who speaks in whistles and words with notorious persuasiveness. They, Kooshdakhaas , appear most often on beaches, where people have nearly or fully drowned, but also deep in the woods, where people are lost, to be found or not, with their wits intact or not. Regardless of one’s willingness to be moved by other-than-human wills, and regardless of whether it is possible or meaningful to categorically determine the benevolence or malevolence of such wills in advance, one can be sure that an encounter with the Kooshdakhaa indicates the presence of a limit that singularly human beings transgress at their peril. To remain a human person after an encounter with a Kooshdakhaa qua limit is always to stop or to turn back before it is too late, sometimes by heeding the Kooshdakhaa ’s warning, but more often by resisting its enticement.
