At'at'aɬia is the dreaded child-stealing ogress of the Wasco and Wishram, a giant cannibal woman who prowls beyond the edge of the village and carries wandering children away in a pitch-lined basket on her back. She serves in the storytelling both as a genuine object of dread and as a disciplinary warning to children not to stray. In the characteristic ending the captives outwit her, escape the basket, and destroy her in the fire, and from her burning body come the mosquitoes or other biting insects, so that the monster is at once defeated and left permanently on the land in diminished form. She belongs to a widely shared Plateau and Columbia River ogress figure, and sources differ over the exact spelling and the local details of her undoing.