In Haida Gwaii there was a Dogfish Woman (Qqaaxhadajaat):

"A woman went travelling with her husband. She used to make fun of the dogfish. They went to visit a small rock in the sea. When they were out there, the dogfish, whose home the rock was, came and took the woman down into the sea.

There she discovered that the dogfish were really people. They had taken off their dogfish blankets. After she had stayed in the house for some time, fins began to grow upon her arms, her legs, and her back.

Her husband was searching for her everywhere, but he was not able to find her. After a number of years he found her. Her face had remained unchanged; but fins had grown on her arms, on her legs, on her back, and on her head. She never returned. Ever since that time her family have used the dogfish crest, and their house is called Dogfish House.

Dogfish do not have fins on their heads, and it is highly unlikely that Daxhiigang said the Dogfish Woman had fins on her head either. I suspect that he said something much more careful and precise than the paraphrase suggests, and quite possibly just as precise as the image he drew.

That image was made quickly but with absolute assurance. It incorporates with surgical clarity the gill slits, the crescent-shaped mouth full of sharp, triangular teeth, the vertical pupils, elongated forehead, asymmetrical caudal fin and spined double dorsal fins of the dogfish.

The woman within the dogfish is just as clearly shown. She is hairless like a slave but wears the face paint and labret of a Haida woman aristocrat. She also has - or she and the dogfish jointly have - what seem to be the talons of an eagle or a raven ...

... Swanton's notes tell us that Qqaaxhadajaat, the Dogfish Woman, 'is the sister of Nang Ttl Dlstlas': the sister of the One They Hand Along.

If we take this statement narrowly and literally, it means that Qqaaxhadajaat is the daughter of the woman who was kidnapped by a creature from the sea. She is the sister of the reincarnated sea god who is born to a human mother, laced into his cradle, and returned to his rightful place on the floor of the sea ...

... perhaps it is not irrelevant that, of all the sharks and rays, dogfish are the nearest to human form and scale. On the Northwest Coast, they are also the most frequent in the vicinity of human villages. Sharks and rays also differ from most fishes in having what mammals like ourselves can recognize as a sex life.

Their eggs are fertilized internally, like the ova of warm-blooded animals, not externally, like the roe of herring, halibut and salmon. The male dogfish penetrates the female.

Dogfish, like other sharks and rays, also appear to be doubly potent, since the males have two penises (actually claspers) and the female two vaginas.

In Haida - but not so far as I know in any other languages of the Northwest Coast - the link between adultery and dogfish is reinforced by a pun. The dogfish is called qqaaxhada in Haida; qqaaxhii is one of the Haida words for penis.

And then there is the matter of the fins. Killer whales, in ordinary life, have large and impressive dorsal fins, but only one dorsal fin each. In Haida myth and Haida art ... they frequently have double dorsal fins. Dogfish - evidently doubly potent in this respect as well - have two dorsal fins even in daily life.

Humans and dogfish, then, like men and women, are close in some respects, and in others blatantly different. Some of their differences, however, are subtle and complex. Where physical love is concerned, one difference of importance is the skin. Dogfish skin is rough - so rough that Haida carpenters and carvers us it for sandpaper.

Sometimes in the 1930s, a Tshimshian mythteller known as Arthur Lewis told the Nishga ethnographer Gwüsk'aayn (William Beynon) a story in which the Raven visits a village of beautiful women. They allow him to make love to them one by one - but he wears his penis to shreds as he does so, because they are sharks. A man whose wife is potentially a dogfish is a man potentially too fragile to make love to the very woman he loves most." (Sharp as a Knife)

I can feel this Dogfish Woman is an important part of the mythical cosmos, a part containing keys for understanding. Threads connect from every direction to the Dogfish Woman, for instance the skin which is rough in contrast to the slippery 'underwear' skin of the flatfish:

... Formerly, the land animals and fish paid a visit to the South Wind. They found him asleep and thought they would frighten him. The Cuttle-fish hid under the bed, the Flounder and the Skate lay flat on the floor at the foot of the bed, and the Mouse bit the sleeping Wind's nose. The latter jumped out of bed and, in so doing, slipped on the two flat-fish and fell ...

What made me introduce the Dogfish Woman myth here is the possibility that the pillars upholding the sky are three, not two:

The central and highest of the poles in the picture has a dogfish at the top:

"... The lowest figure on the housepole - largely obscured by brush - is the long-billed Raven. Above him sits Qinggi with the young adopted Raven, in human form, in his embrace. This Raven is holding a bear cub - one of the animals he offers to Qinggi in Skaay's poem. Qinggi's head is level with the roof of the house. Above that rises his tall hat, along the sides of which the villagers have taken refuge. A third incarnation of the Raven - his familiar avian form - is perched on the top.

Two memorial poles stand in front of the house. The taller of these, bearing the figure of the Dogfish, was erected after 1878 in memory of Xhyuu's predecessor, his maternal uncle Gitkuna. The other is a memorial for Gitkuna's own maternal uncle. The figure on that pole (again overgrown by brush) is the Beaver wearing an equally tall hat ..." (Sharp as a Knife)

The three poles in the picture, which for an instance made me imagine three cosmic poles instead of two, are of two kinds - the house pole (left) and the two memorial poles (right). The tallest pole, with a dogfish at the top, is without any carvings and impossible to climb. The other two poles are filled with carvings on their 'hats' (remember the Mad Hatter).

"... Live holothurians, when handled, have the disconcerting habit of transforming themselves suddenly from soft to hard or limp to stiff and back again. If handled enough, they will also ejaculate, disgorging their own viscera in apparent self-defence.

This behavior is efficiently explained in a story Arthur Lewis told in Tsimshian to Gwüsk'aayn in the 1930s. The first holothurian, Lewis says, was the cast-off penis of the Raven ..." (Sharp as a Knife)

"... Sea cucumbers have also inspired thousands of haiku in Japan, where they are called namako (ナマコ), written with characters that can be translated 'sea mice'. In English translations of these haiku, they are usually called 'sea slugs'; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term 'sea slug' originally referred to holothurians (in the 18th century), though biologists now use the name only for the nudibranch molluscs, marine relatives of land slugs. Almost 1,000 Japanese holothurian haiku translated into English appear in the book Rise, Ye Sea Slugs! by Robin D. Gill ..." (Wikipedia)