Tulung

Tulung was a half-Koyukon in Shaun Brett's employ.

He was born in 1954 in Alaska to an archaeologist from Colorado and a Koyukon woman. In 1964, when Tulung was ten, his father was hired by Shaun Brett's father, a wealthy oilman, to work on a dig near Koyukuk, but he died when it caved in, leaving Brett the only survivor. Tulung blamed Brett for his father's death, while Shaun blamed Tulung's father for the elder Brett's death out of guilt over what happened. Both became obsessed with the hope that someday one would prove the other wrong.

When Brett began building a monument to his deceased father, he employed Tulung to assure the local Koyukon - who saw the gathering of building materials as a desecration of the land they revered - that he honoured their traditions. In 1994, the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa came to the nearly-completed monument and met Tulung while tracking unusual energy readings. When the Permians revived, Tulung fell under their influence and began to believe they were under attack by the spirits of his people's beliefs. The likewise-affected Brett took him to the dig site, where they learned that their fathers had unearthed a Permian fossil which attacked them. Brett believed that his father sacrificed the expedition to save the world from the creatures, but Tulung discovered evidence that Brett's father fled while Tulung's father destroyed the Permian. Tulung then helped the Doctor burn the monument to the ground to kill the Permians inside. (AUDIO: The Land of the Dead)