Context: The informant is now retired, but used to tell the story every year at a summer camp i attended. He does not remember where he first heard the story, but believes it to be at least partially based on real events.

Interview:
H: “I’ll just give you the synopsis, the real story would take twenty minutes… Essentially there were these Americans up in the Yukon in Alaska, two guys, big game hunters. They come to a trading post asking about a good place to hunt, and the natives tell them to stay away from the valley. Well they went anyway. They thought the natives were trying to keep them away because that’s where the best hunting is.

Interviewer: “And what did you say the name of the tribe was?”

H: “Its the Kaska Dena: K-A-S-K-A.
So they went down into the valley, and they don’t find anything the first day. In the night they here a thumping noise in the forest. They had a dog with them, so they wake up in the night and the dog is all ripped to pieces.

Well they decided to stay the night anyway. And when one of the guys woke up, he saw the other guy dismembered too, just like the dog, and no animal tracks or anything, no signs, except there was blood on the branches of the big tree, and he hears the thumping again coming from the tree.

So the guy just starts running, and finally makes it back to the horses. They had to leave the horses because they couldn’t get down into the valley. But when he got back to the village, well not the village but the little trading post, he was all cut up and bruised from running through the bushes and everything. And obviously his mental state was pretty messed up. I think he pretty much went mad.

It’s a real disappearance too, you can look it up.”

Interviewer: “And do you know what the name for the demon is?”

H: “Oh, yes. I think the Kaska call it A’tix.”

Analysis: The story seems to be a combination of several different elements. The Kaska Dena are a real tribe spanning a massive area of Canada and Alaska, and A’tix seems to be a real legend associated with them. As far as I can tell, the Legend of A’tix does not really have much to do with the real disappearance mentioned, which was most likely a reference to the Nahanni Valley, or the “Valley of Headless Men”. While both A’tix and the Valley of Headless men are quite poorly documented online, some accounts claim that over 40 headless bodies were discovered in the valley in the early 1900’s.

It is not difficult to see how these two stories may have become associated, with the legend of A’tix, a man-eating demon serving as the solution to the mysterious corpses, With both taking place in the Yukon, when it was still largely unknown to Americans.