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Overview
Ts’ak’ lives with his grandmother and catches salmon in a nearby stream. A great Grizzly Bear steals the fish. When Ts’ak’ confronts him, the bear draws him into its body with a sniff. Ts’ak’ survives inside, lights a fire and kills the bear. He escapes and brings his grandmother to help butcher and preserve the meat. His victory initially supplies the household with food.
Across the river he visits a gambling house occupied by Wolves. They bind him and raid his grandmother’s stores. After their release leaves the pair hungry, Ts’ak’ mutilates his sleeping grandmother and tricks her into eating the severed flesh, then taunts her. She expels him. A stranger later gives him a hollow bone with which he secretly afflicts the chief’s daughter. He offers to cure the illness he caused, despite not being a shaman. With birds accompanying his performance and the enslaved giant Drum-belly serving as a living drum, he removes the sickness. The daughter marries him; wealth and Drum-belly are transferred to him.
He eventually abandons that wife to seek another beyond a mountain. Attempts to fly over it in robin and bluejay skins fail when fire burns the wings. Two Mouse sisters then provide hospitality and an underground route. The second gives him a small object described successively as ice and crystal. With it he blocks a rapidly closing stone door that has killed earlier suitors, and enters the new bride’s house.
Her father subjects him to further lethal ordeals. Ts’ak’ breaks the dangerous hairs of a bearskin before sitting on it, survives boiling water, and escapes a tree deliberately clamped around him. He brings half the tree home and breaks the house front with it. During a seal hunt he anticipates another attempt to push him into a whirlpool and instead throws the attacker overboard. His plentiful catch becomes a communal feast, and the chief stops trying to kill him.
Ts’ak’ then returns toward his grandmother and first wife, accompanied by his new wife and Drum-belly, who has waited in the woods. The Mouse sisters feed them and open the return route. The story ends at his own house without describing reconciliation with those he harmed. His survival and acquisition of status therefore coexist with cruelty, deception and the consequences of his actions; a uniformly virtuous hero would misrepresent Moses’s account.
Origins & earliest records
Franz Boas, Tsimshian Texts, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 27 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902). Recorded at Kinkolith, at the Nass River’s mouth, in November–December 1894. Boas’s introduction, dated June 1899, names Philip, Moses, Chief Mountain and Moody as the collection’s narrators. The volume prints the language it calls Nîsqa’E alongside English translation; individual story headings identify their tellers.
Records & interpretation
Complete English Ts’ak’, pp.117–136, read with named Moses heading and introduction p.5. Translation alternates ice and crystal for the helper’s object; no independent linguistic resolution is claimed.
Selected bibliography
Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.
- 01
Tsimshian Texts: Nass River Dialect
Ts’ak’, complete pp.117–136; Moses heading and introduction p.5.
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
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- Primary textBoas 1902 original Nass River collectionResearch access: 2026-10-05
Image credits
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