Kart is the monstrous old woman of Andic and Avar wonder-tales, a devourer of the unwary. She is described with copper or iron teeth and long breasts flung back over her shoulders, and she often meets the hero first in the guise of a hospitable crone before her cannibal nature shows. Encounters with her form a fixed episode of the heroic and magic-tale repertoire, in which cunning, a taboo broken or observed, and sometimes the hero's helper-animals decide whether he escapes her cave or is eaten.