Yushkep Kamuy is the Ainu spider-goddess, also called Ashketanne-mat, 'the long-fingered woman'. Ashkenazi (Handbook of Japanese Mythology, p. 294) records her as the benevolent familiar of the female shamans, called upon by women at childbirth because her long fingers can safely draw out the infant. Her kamuy-yukar tells how, warned by a friendly deity of the demon-suitor Poronitne Kamuy who lived beyond the horizon, she turned herself into a reed and set her servant-spirits — chestnut-boy, needle-boy, hornet-boy, viper-boy and the mortar-and-pestle — to ambush him, wounding him so that he fled and was never heard of again. Flagged SOLITARY: the sources give her no divine parent or consort, only her servant-spirits and the demon she defeats; she is authored as an independent kamuy.