The Masmasalanix are the four supernatural carpenters, a quartet of divine craftsmen who act as the hands of creation. Commissioned by Alhkuntam, they carved the first human beings, shaped the animals, and set in order the mountains, rivers, and other features of the world. In Nuxalk art the four are shown together on the rims of ceremonial carvings, standing for the four traditional territories drawn into one; their forty fingers are read as the forty ancestral lineages of the surviving village sites. Though acting as a single named body, they are always reckoned as four, and their carpentry is the instrument through which the creator's design was realised.