Hawt, the body-playing musician

Overview

In Curtin’s Hawt, Tsaroki Sakahl travels secretly to fetch the brother whom Waida Dikit wants as his companion. Hawt presides over a working household where others prepare skins and arrows. He leaves without explaining his destination to them, then shares Tsaroki’s flute at Waida Dikit’s house. Kanhlalas, the older musician invited to teach them, shines faintly in the dark; after prolonged playing his breast becomes white as his breath fails.

Waida Dikit convenes a much larger contest. One player after another exhausts his breath and acquires a new color or pattern. Hawt waits until everyone else has finished and fallen asleep. At Tsaroki’s prompting he passes underground to the fireplace, lies on his back and begins to play. He takes air through his nostrils and fingers two rows of holes along his sides, using his body rather than a separate flute.

Tsudi hears the extraordinary music, first thinking it a dream, and wakes the others. A shining beard hair lent by Waida Werris reveals Hawt lying with his arms across his breast; the audience cannot see the subtle finger movements or an instrument. He reproduces the music of every person present before playing his own, ranging from powerful loudness to exceptional softness. The gathering acclaims him its supreme musician. Curtin’s introductory personage list associates Hawt with eel; the narrative itself emphasizes breath, bodily openings and musical distinction.

A different episode, Tulchuherris, presents Hawt as a treacherous carrier at a broad river. He offers to take the traveler across on his back, then sinks progressively deeper. Warned by his concealed adviser, Tulchuherris stabs the carrier with a pointed bone and leaps from his head to the bank. He declares that the defeated person will become an eel called hawt and be eaten by future people. This explicit transformation belongs to the dangerous journey narrative, not to the musician’s performance; the collection does not reconcile the two episodes into a single continuous biography.

Origins & earliest records

Jeremiah Curtin, Creation Myths of Primitive America in Relation to the Religious History and Mental Development of Mankind (Boston: Little, Brown, 1898). Collection notes pp. 486–487 identify the first nine narratives as Wintu and describe his California collecting in 1895 and earlier publication in The Sun. This chapter names no individual teller.

Records & interpretation

Complete Hawt, pp. 177–208, including the feast, distribution of food and final return to Tede Puyuk. The chapter names no individual teller. Its personage list and narrative explanations are distinguished from zoological and astronomical claims. The complete Tulchuherris narrative and its note supply a separately framed river-carrier episode.

Selected bibliography

Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.

1. 01

   Creation Myths of Primitive America

   Jeremiah Curtin, collector and English presenter; individual Wintu teller unnamed here · 1898

   Complete Hawt, pp. 177–208; collection provenance pp. 486–487. Complete Tulchuherris121–160, carrier episode132–133 and note504–505.

Family, evolution & connections

Hawt and Tsaroki Sakahl - stated brothers

Repeated narrator brother statements on pp. 183-187 and 195-196.

Parallel branches show stated siblings under a grouping heading, not an ancestor. No parents or birth generations are supplied here. Grandfather and grandson forms of address elsewhere are not used to invent a wider pedigree. This is Curtin’s English narrative witness, not a universal account of Wintu relationships.

References

Sources supporting this profile. Linked pages have their own scope and editorial standards.

1. Primary textCurtin1898 digitised primary collectionResearch access: 2026-10-05

Image credits

A sourced illustration has not yet been added. This gap is included in the coverage record.