Tugrsh ytik, the 'Fire Grandmother', personifies the hearth fire in Nivkh religion. Evgenii Kreinovich, who lived among the Sakhalin and Amur Nivkh in the 1920s, recorded the dense web of taboos surrounding fire: it could not be stabbed, spat into, or doused carelessly, for an aged mistress lived within it. Each clan's hearth fire, kindled with the hereditary ritual flint, was a symbol of the clan itself, and before hunts, sea voyages, and journeys the Nivkh fed the fire with food and tobacco so that the fire mistress would carry the offerings to the spirit-masters of sea and mountain. She stands alongside the masters of mountain, sea, and sky as one of the principal elemental owners of the Nivkh world.