Tulukaruk, the Raven, is the great transformer of Yup'ik oral tradition, a benevolent culture-hero who shapes the land, releases the animals and orders the conditions of human life, yet who is at the same time an incorrigible trickster whose greed and rash schemes turn against him. Edward Nelson recorded an extensive Raven cycle among the Bering Sea peoples in the late nineteenth century, and the figure remains central to Yup'ik storytelling. Among the beings Raven is said to have created is the fearsome Palraiyuk of the marshes. His double nature, world-maker and buffoon, is characteristic of the Raven tricksters of the wider North Pacific and Arctic, though Yup'ik tellings give him their own distinctive episodes.