The Teakettler is a legendary creature from American folklore with origins in lumberjack

Lumberjack

A lumberjack is a worker in the logging industry who performs the initial harvesting and transport of trees for ultimate processing into forest products. The term usually refers to a bygone era when hand tools were used in harvesting trees principally from virgin forest...

 culture, specifically the lumber camps of Minnesota

Minnesota

Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...

 and Wisconsin

Wisconsin

Wisconsin is a U.S. state located in the north-central United States and is part of the Midwest. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake Michigan to the east, Michigan to the northeast, and Lake Superior to the north. Wisconsin's capital is...

. It is part of a group of similar folklore creatures known collectively as Fearsome Critters

Fearsome critters

Fearsome critter is a term found in early lumberjack folklore for any of the mythical beasts that were said to inhabit the frontier wilderness of North America.- Origins :...

. Overall, it resembles a small stubby legged dog with the ears of a cat. It gets its name from the sound it makes, which is akin to that of a boiling tea kettle. It only walks backwards (by choice) and steam issues from its mouth as it makes its whistle. Only a few lumberjacks have seen one, as they are very shy, but if a boiling kettle is heard and nowhere to be found, it is sure that a Teakettler is nearby.

An account is given by Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...

 under "Fauna of the United States" in Book of Imaginary Beings

Book of Imaginary Beings

Jorge Luis Borges wrote and edited the Book of Imaginary Beings in 1957 as the original Spanish Manual de zoología fantástica, or Handbook of Fantastic Zoology, expanding it in 1967 and 1969 to the final El libro de los seres imaginarios...

(1957).