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Overview

Hehku has killed Tsanunewa’s relatives and deliberately shrinks into his mousetrap to create a pretext for pursuing him. She paints her face red, wears a cap made from victims’ skulls and runs with her hands clasped behind her, raising wind. The boy’s foster grandmother delays her while he flees. Successive protectors fail: Hehku revives after impalement, swallows Mipka, burns Matauwila with fire flashing from her body and overcomes the two Chichi brothers despite their slippery crystal thresholds.

When exhausted, she commands the Chichi house to stretch after the fugitive and carry her. At Jupka’s house the other inhabitants urge surrender, but Jupka refuses after the boy says she intends to kill him. He makes Tsanunewa full-grown, extinguishes Hehku’s bodily fire with smoke and eventually puts her to sleep. He then prevents her dreaming, because her harmful dreams can come to pass. The narrator distinguishes the extraordinary second tobacco from the ordinary Yana tobacco known in the telling’s present.

Hehku returns with her sister Miniau Marimi after dreaming of gambling. Beautifully disguised, she wins successive opponents’ possessions and lives: her song moves the hidden finger-bone into whichever hand was not guessed. The bone kills each loser, including Tsanunewa. Jupka finally wins through a deliberately ambiguous utterance that also brings his shining great house, Wahkalu or Mount Shasta, into view. He takes the bone, kills Hehku and then defeats her sister.

Jupka restores the slain players with a wild-rose stem. The women’s defeat is also temporary: Hehku rises at dawn, revives Miniau with her foot and leaves furious. She becomes a great bounding head, covering a mile at each leap, while her fire-drill-associated sister keeps pace. Curtin calls Hehku a horned serpent in the personage list, but her pursuit, disguises and skull-person transformation require a broader account than a static snake description.

Victims’ skulls worn as a capFire flashes from her bodySinging moves a hidden gaming boneRevives and becomes a bounding head
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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 notes486–487 distinguish the first nine narratives as Wintu and the later thirteen as Yana. Curtin describes California collecting in1895 and prior publication of these narratives in The Sun. The Yana section begins at281; these selected chapters do not name individual tellers.

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Records & interpretation

Complete The Flight of Tsanunewa and Defeat of Hehku, pp. 445–464, read, including the narrator’s bracketed tobacco distinction on p. 458 and Hehku’s final self-revival. Curtin’s Tsanunewa animal correspondences vary between chapters and are not silently harmonised.

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 Yana teller unnamed here · 1898

    The Flight of Tsanunewa and Defeat of Hehku, pp. 445–464; Yana section p. 281 and provenance pp. 486–487.

Family & connections

A source-supported family tree or inspiration record has not yet been compiled for this profile. Related reading below indicates a connection in subject matter, not a proven lineage or creative influence.

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

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