The Doings of Coyote

Long ago. Coyote was told that the people were dying. He tied together a hairbrush, a wooden skin-dresser, and a stone pestle, and threw them in the water. “If these float let them come back to life,” he said. They sank and, therefore, the dead did not come back..

Snow fell. It rained down in the form of flour. This same Coyote said, “I chewed ice,” and it became ice.

Also the horns of deer were tallow. Coyote again said, “ I chew bones.” Coyote became ill. He had a handsome daughter. When he became ill, he told his wife to throw him away. He said their daughter was to be given to a man with a panther-skin quiver on his back who would come to play najone. This man, he said, would also have a prairie-dog in his hand.

When Coyote was dead his wife gave the daughter to the man described by Coyote and he married her. It was Coyote himself, who married his own daughter. He had her hunt his lice. On the back of his head was a large wart. He told her that the lice always stay on this side, indicating a portion of his head remote from the wart.

While she was looking for his lice, her husband fell asleep. Wondering why he always spoke as he did, she looked on the back of his head. There was a wart there. She slipped his head off her lap while he was asleep and going to her mother told her that the man was her father; that he had a wart on the back of his head.

She picked up a large stone and was about to strike him on the crown of his head when he saw her shadow. He jumped, ran out, and trotted off toward the east. Whenever he came where there were camps, people reviled him as the man who had his own daughter for his wife. They heard him saying “ci, ci, ci.” They referred to him as the scabby one and hit him.

He cried “wai” and turned from human form into a coyote. Coyote was driving some mules. He smothered five of the mules. He wondered what smothered them. “Hurry,” he said, “skin their throats. This place will be called Coyote Springs,” he said. When coyotes were people they all drank whiskey and ran about everywhere shouting. When they became coyotes, they barked.