Sometimes a whale will stray up the Yukon River, and when this happens, unless the whale is killed, there will be a great famine. Once, a whale went up river as far as Tenana, about nine hundred miles. There was great alarm, and one of the shamans, a shaman of medium powers (there are shamans of high, medium, and low powers; nowadays, however, there are no very great shamans who, as in the ancient days, can do everything; nowadays some shamans do one kind of thing, others, other things), this Tenana shaman went out single-handed and speared the stray whale. It was forty to fifty degrees below zero, he was nude from the waist up, and from the great exposure and the great strain, within a few days he died. The people were so grateful to the shaman for saving the village that they made a carving in split spruce of the shaman spearing the spouting whale, to place near his grave-box.