In oral traditions stories are fluid. Ideally they have a moral and some event that makes them stick in a memory. A good story is the protein that wraps the DNA of the idea. Together they make a virus that infects the imagination and spreads from person to person, village to village, and culture to culture. There are no boundaries, and the infection is spontaneous.

It’s 4:30 pm and the courthouse is still open. A detective in jeans and a black shirt sits in the lobby waiting for a judicial officer. A heavyset man in an expensive blue suit rushes towards me. A path, I notice, that happens to be a perfect line from the restroom to the Superior Court rooms.

I dodge him as he squeezes between me and the vending machines. I count myself fortunate to escape injury and proceed to the Public Defender’s Office. There, I greet Barrow’s Assistant Public Defender, D.M. M. cuts an impressive figure for a public servant. His shirt pressed, his tie tight, his manner mocks the fatigue that usually dominates Friday afternoons.

I thank him again for agreeing to the interview and ask if I can record our meeting. He agrees.

M. grew up in Kotzebue Alaska. He views Alaskan Natives’ oral tradition almost romantically, “the old elder acting out a story.” However, he concedes that oral traditions, “don’t seem to be the most effective way to keep something alive . . .”
Kotzebue, Alaska is part of the Northwest Arctic Borough. North of Nome it rests on a spit of the Baldwin Peninsula (the Iñupiaq word translates to “almost an island”).
M. was six when his family moved to Kotzebue from a secluded area outside Denali Park. He describes the move as a positive experience.

“What did you like most about Kotzebue?”

“Kotzebue was like an urban center compared to where I moved from . . . there were people everywhere! There were cars, people just walking right by your house and through your yard . . . no big deal. It was very different.” Despite the differences, he enjoyed his time in the small arctic village. Then I ask if anything scary happened while in Kotzebue. He mentions an encounter with a dog.

“What happened?”

“Well, I was walking through their yard, climbing on stuff and this big mean lab . . . ok, a Lab-Mix we will say, for those lab lovers out there. Ran up and bit me on the leg.” I solicit more information; did the event traumatize him? “Well, I didn’t go into their yard anymore. I didn’t go over to their house for a while . . . stopped being friends with their kid . . . I also turned into a cat person, I think.” He added the last, grinning slightly.

Then I begin my inquiry, “When I asked you about local legends around Kotzebue what was the first one that came to mind?”

He didn’t miss a beat, “The Big-Mouthed Baby, it’s seared into my memory.”

“Tell me about the Big-Mouthed Baby.”

“I heard a lot of legends when I was a kid, I don’t remember many of them . . . except the Big-Mouthed baby. It goes like this: A long time ago in a small native village there was a family with several children. Then they have this baby. The baby comes into the world and joins the 5 older brothers and sisters. They live in this little sod house; relatively, it’s rather big compared to other sod houses at the time. As the kids getting older, 1 month old, 2 months old, every night the mom and dad would rub seal oil on the outside of its lips. They did this every night; they were religious about it. Then one night, when the baby was maybe 8-9 months old, the parents went out to a village festival. The Parents came home, and they forgot to put seal oil on the kid’s mouth. That night the baby’s older brother, maybe 9 or 10 years old, wakes up to this crunching noise in the darkness. And he starts looking around. He looks around the corner and he sees his baby brother eating his mom. He has almost completely devoured his mom. This kid then realizes most of his brothers and sisters are gone. That this baby just, all night long, has been going to town eating his siblings and parents one by one. The brother runs out of the house. He starts waking up the villagers saying his baby brother has gone crazy, he’s just eating everybody. So the town gets together and by this time the baby has finished consuming his mom. Now he is crawling out of the house, he’s going down the middle of the village chasing after his brother and anybody else who gets in his way. By now he is still a little baby, has the features of a baby, but his mouth has grown from temple to temple . . . Just this huge mouth . . .” M. stops to gesture with his hands at this point, spanning them about two palm lengths on either side of his head.

He continues, “So the baby is chasing after his brother. His brother grabs the rest of the villagers, and they run to a bridge spanning a small river. It is a makeshift bridge. Then they get the idea that when the baby gets on the bridge they can collapse the bridge. In the river, there were mermaids.”

“Mermaids?”

He surrenders a placating smile, “Now, remember, I heard this when I was a kid… it must have been the whalers’ influence or something. But there were mermaids, I don’t know what they looked like or if they were women, or what, but the mermaids lived in the river. So the baby comes up, gets on the bridge, they collapse the bridge. The baby falls into the river, and the mermaids grab the baby and pull him out into the ocean.”

“That is amazing.” I am in awe.

He continues. “I heard another version where the baby gets out of the house and starts eating a couple villagers. Then they realize, ok, the only way we stop the baby from eating the rest of us is we start feeding it stuff. So all the hunters go out and get seals, whales, and caribou. Their whole life revolves around hunting and feeding this baby. The more they feed it the greater its apatite gets, the greater it grows, and… I think mermaids eventually get that one too.”

This story is mainly told in the area around the Baldwin Peninsula. There is no evidence the central theme, a cannibalistic baby, has spread beyond Kotzebue’s outlying villages. Moreover, the story contains few parallel morals found in other children’s stories. Especially those told in the west. One theme of the Big-Mouthed Baby warns the hunter- gathers to share bounties of the community with everyone in the community. This contrasts sharply with the Russian story of the Little Red Hen and The Ant and The Grasshopper. Both stories that stress a, those who do not work reap no reward, theme. I come to this conclusion noting that the baby only begins eating people after his parents neglect to share the seal oil. Another moral: a warning of cannibalism. Furthermore, presuming the baby represents society: the second version of the story that M. volunteered could represent the ceaseless efforts made, by hunters, to keep the village from literally eating itself.

But something troubles me about the stories ending. A deus ex machina where mermaids appear and sweep the baby out to sea? This conclusion seems far too Mediterranean. It is reminiscent of the North Syrian island goddess Atargatis, known to the Greeks as Aphrodite Derceto. Atargatis was the premier goddess of her people, the Northern Syrians. Legend holds she dove into a lake, with the full intent of becoming a fish. Atargatis was a very beautiful goddess and such an action would dim all beauty in the world. So the other gods pooled their resources and retarded her transformation. She became the first mermaid, half woman half fish. So, in the case of the Big-Mouthed Baby how could mermaids, whose origins lay in Syrian legend, have taken root in the Americas, and ultimately above the Arctic Circle? I chewed on this riddle until I found the anthropology text, Social Life of North West Alaska: The Structure of Iñupiaq Eskimo Nations by Ernest S. Berch. The passage reads:

“The Nonempirical environment of northwestern Alaska consisted of the souls of people and animals, and of a wide assortment of creatures and other phenomena generally outside western experience. These included gigantic eagles, fish, shrews, and other animals; tiny humanlike creatures who had enormous speed and strength; weird babies with huge mouths; dragons; mermaids; trolls; and a broad array of phenomena generically called tuungat.”

Presuming M. is correct, his version of the story may be a corruption traceable back to white whalers and trappers. However, there is a closer legend that could shine some light on the mermaid puzzle.

Sedna is one name for the Inuit goddess of the sea. Her origin story has compounded and multiplied over the millennia, but two aspects remain the same. First, she is a sea goddess. Second, she has the tail of a whale. This theory is complicated because Sedna’s origins usually take place on Baffin Island. Ultimately Sedna is an Inuit goddess, where the natives of Kotzebue are Iñupiaq. Could this story have migrated so far on its own power? I asked this question of S.A., an Iñupiaq native of Barrow. She provides a possible explanation to this logistical puzzle, “The messenger feast would happen every two years. Messengers would run from village to village. Piviaak [the messenger feast] would be held in February.” Then S.A. told a story of her grandfather traveling from Dead Horse, Alaska to Barrow, Alaska in one day by dog sled. Moreover, according to David S. Lewis’ arctic Born to Run: It’s What Sled Dogs Do Best a sled team can travel up to 150 miles a day. The distance between Kotzebue and Baffin Island is 2,287 miles, roughly the same distance from London to Jerusalem, making a quick trip by sled a grueling 16 days. Consider again that the historical Iñupiaq had summer and winter hunting grounds. Family groups traveled greatly over the course of a year.

Perhaps a simpler explanation sits in the second scenario. The use of the word “Mermaid” might be a simple interpretation during the translation process. Perhaps the original description of the village saviors was a water spirit with the torso of a human and tail of a fish.

A quick Internet search revealed another version of the story. In this final version, the baby was actually eaten by sheefish. Explaining why sheefish have a little hump under their jaw (The Eskimo Doll, 2013).

Popular oral legends are notorious for their resolve to change with every retelling. Ultimately, the end of the baby is a lesson in how myths are impacted by changes in culture. This story is an excellent example of how a viral idea possibly infected an already popular legend.