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Legends

The Woman who Married a Merman

In a village named Takimiya there lived five brothers and a sister. Many men from different places wished to marry the girl, but she did not want to get married. It was her custom to go swimming every day in a little creek. One day while returning from her swim, she noticed that she was pregnant. Her brothers demanded to know how it had happened, but she could not give them an answer because she did not understand it herself. She gave birth to a boy, a fretful baby who cried all the time. They did everything to try and soothe him, but nothing worked. At their wits' end, her brothers finally told her to put the child outdoors. He immediately stopped crying. After a while the mother went out to check on him and noticed, to her surprise, that he was eating a piece of seal meat which someone had strung on a small stick for him. She looked around to see who could have done it, but nobody was there. When she took the child into the house, he started to cry again and would not let anybody sleep. So her brothers told her to take him out again and suggested that she hide and watch what happened.

The mother lay hidden outside for a whole day without seeing anyone. Suddenly toward evening a man appeared and told her to follow him, because he was her husband. At first she refused, fearing that her relatives would not know where she had gone. But after he promised that she would be safe, she took the baby in her arms and went with him. They approached the creek, and her husband told her to hang onto his belt and keep her eyes closed. Together they plunged into the water. Soon they came to the bottom of the sea -- to a village inhabited by many Indians. Her husband was one of the five sons of the village chief, and the couple lived there happy and satisfied. The boy grew up, and like many boys on dry land, he loved to play with arrows. His mother would make them for him, meanwhile telling him that his uncles, who lived above the water, had lots of arrows.

One day the boy asked her to take him to his land uncles to get some arrows. The father objected to this, but he finally allowed his wife to go up alone. Wearing five sea-otter hides, she started out early one morning. As soon as her brothers saw her, they thought she was a real otter, and they began to shoot arrows at her from the shore. Having been hit repeatedly, the otter would sink, then surface again with the arrows gone. The otter swam up and down the river, and many people in canoes kept shooting at it, but nobody could kill it. Eventually everybody gave up the chase except the oldest brother, who followed the otter until it  reached the beach. Coming nearer, he caught the shape of a woman beneath the skins and recognized her at once as his lost sister. She told him that she had been the sea otter, and showed him the arrows that the people had shot at her. "I came to get them for my boy," she said. "My husband is the son of a chief. Whenever the tide is low, you can see our house right in the middle of the ocean." She gave him the five sea-otter skins, and he gave her as many arrows as she could carry.

Before going down into the water, she told him, "Tomorrow morning you will find a whale on the beach, right in front of your landing. "And it happened just as she said. The whale landed on the beach, and the men divided its meat among all the people. A few months later the woman came again to her relatives, and her brothers noticed that her shoulders were turning scaly and dark like those of a sea serpent. She stayed a while, and then returned to her water home, but she never came ashore again and was seen no more. Long afterwards, many sea serpents came into the harbor. Thinking that they too may have come after arrows, the people kept on shooting at them. They never returned again, but every summer and winter they would put ashore two whales as a gift to their kinsmen above the sea.
 
 
 

* Based on a myth reported by Harry St. Clair in 1909