Bilyukai, whom the eighteenth-century sources also call Pilyachuch, is the thunderer of the Kamchadal (Itelmen) world-picture: a man of very small stature who lives on the clouds with a host of gamul spirits and sends down thunder, lightning and rain, the rainbow being taken for the motley hem of his garment. He wears a coat of wolverine skin, the fur the Kamchadals prized most, and travels riding on birds, especially ptarmigans, whose passenger's tracks people sometimes claimed to find. In the creation account, Tyzhil-Kutkhu made the land animals and set Pilyachuch over them as their herdsman, and later ethnography accordingly describes him as the spirit-master of the animals.
Domains
thunder lightning and rain
mastery of the land animals
Powers
to send thunder, lightning and rain from the clouds
to command the land animals as their herdsman and master
S. P. Krasheninnikov, Opisanie zemli Kamchatki [Description of the Land of Kamchatka] (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1755), vol. 2, pt. 3.
G. W. Steller, Beschreibung von dem Lande Kamtschatka (Frankfurt and Leipzig: J. G. Fleischer, 1774); English: Steller's History of Kamchatka, trans. Margritt Engel and Karen Willmore (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2003).
A. A. Sirina and O. A. Murashko, 'Verovaniia itel'menov' [Beliefs of the Itelmens], in Narody Severo-Vostoka Sibiri, ed. E. P. Bat'ianova and V. A. Turaev (Moscow: Nauka, 2010).