Adlet- Inuit CreatureCreature · Hybrid"Dog-People"
Also known as: Erqigdlit
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Description
Born from the union of an Inuit woman and her dog husband, the Adlet are human above the waist and run on powerful dog legs below. Their mother sent them inland, and they became a fierce race of the interior, hostile to every human they encountered.
Mythology & Lore
The Dog Husband's Children
A young woman refused every human suitor who came for her. In Boas's telling from the Central Inuit, she was too proud. In Rink's Greenlandic accounts, she simply found no man worthy. Either way, she took a dog as her husband and bore his children.
Her father discovered the union and was furious. He set his daughter and her brood adrift, or in the Greenlandic tradition, marooned them on an island. Stranded and starving, the woman sent her dog husband swimming back to her father's camp for food. Her father packed the dog's carrying bags with rocks. The animal sank before it reached the island.
Alone with her children, the woman divided them. The Adlet, the ones with dog legs and sharp teeth, she sent inland. Go, she told them, survive as you can. Her other children she placed on a boot-sole and blew them across the sea. In the telling Boas recorded, those children became the ancestors of the white people who would one day arrive from across the ocean.
The Inland Race
The Adlet became what their mother made them: survivors. Human above the waist, they use tools and think like people. Below the waist, dog legs carry them faster than any human can run. They are hostile to everyone who enters their territory, and the interior of the land is theirs.