AMERICAN INDIAN MYTHS AND LEGENDS

by Richard Erdoes

  The women retorted: “It is you men who would be unhappy if you could be with the women only every four days.”

  And the fight grew angrier and angrier. The men cried: “Were it ten days, twenty days, thirty days that we remained apart from you, we’d never be unhappy.” The women replied: “We think not, but we women would be very contented to remain away from you men for sixty days.” And the men said: “We men would be happy to remain apart from you women for five moons.” The women, growing more excited, cried: “You do not speak the truth; we women would be contented to be separated from you ten moons.” The men retorted: “We men could remain away from you women twenty moons and be very happy.” You do not speak the truth,” said the women, “for you wish to be with us all the time, day and night.”

  Three days they quarreled and on the fourth day the women finally took themselves to one side of the pueblo, while the men and boys gathered on the other side, each forming their own kiva, or ceremonial chamber. The women had a great talk and the men held a council. They were both furious with one another.

  The ti’amoni, who presided over the council, said: “Perhaps you will each be contented if you and the women try living apart.” And on the following morning he had all the men and male children who were not being nourished by their mothers cross the great river which ran by the village, the women remaining in the village. The men departed at sunrise, and the women were delighted. They said: “We can do all the work; we understand the men’s work and we can work like them.” The men said to each other: “We can do the things the women did for us.” As they left the village the men called to the women: “We leave you to yourselves, perhaps for one year, perhaps for two, and perhaps longer. Who knows how it will work out? After all, men are not so amorous as you.

  It took a long time for the men to cross the river, as it was very wide. The ti’amoni led the men and remained with them. The women were compelled by the ti’amoni to send their male infants over the river as soon as they ceased nourishing them. For two moons the men and women were very happy. The men were busy hunting and had all the game they could eat, but the women had no animal food. The men grew stout and the women very thin. At the expiration of the first ten moons some of the women were sad away from the men. As the second year passed, more of the women wanted the men, but the men seemed perfectly satisfied with the way things were. After three years the women more and more wished for the men, but the men were only slightly desirous of the women.

  When the fourth year was half gone, the women called to the ti’amoni, saying: “We want the men to come to us.” The female children had grown up like reeds; they had no flesh on them. The morning after the women begged the ti’amoni for the return of the men, they recrossed the river to live again with the women, and in four days after their return the women had recovered their flesh.

  —Based on Matilda Cox Stevenson’s report of 1889.

  A CONTEST FOR WIVES

  [COCHITI]

  At Amatsushe they were living; Old Coyote and Old Coyote Woman lived on one side of the hill and Old Beaver and Old Beaver Woman lived on the other. They visited each other every night. One night it was snowing, deep, and Old Coyote said to his wife, “I shall go to Old Brother Beaver to invite him to go hunting, and to make plans for exchanging our wives.”

  When Coyote got there, he called, “Hello.” Beaver answered, “Hello, come in and sit down.” They sat together by the fireplace to smoke.

  Coyote said, “I came to tell you we are to go hunting. If we kill any rabbits we’ll bring them to our wives. I’ll bring mine to your wife, and you can bring yours to mine.”

  “All right,” Old Beaver agreed.

  “You go first,” said Coyote.

  “No, you go first. This is your invitation; you invited me,” Beaver insisted.

  “All right, I shall go early in the morning.”

  Coyote said to Old Beaver Woman, “In the morning I am going hunting for you.”

  “All right. I shall sing the song so that you will kill many rabbits.” Old Beaver Woman started to fix the supper. She wanted it ready for his return. Old Coyote was gone for the whole day. It was evening, and he did not come home at all. Sitting near the fireplace, Old Beaver Woman waited and waited. She started to sing her song:

  Old Coyote, Old Coyote, come sleep with me,

  Come have intercourse with me,

  Ai-oo-ai-oo.

  Old Beaver said, “What are you singing about? He won’t kill anything, for he isn’t any hunter.” Coyote killed nothing, and Beaver Woman waited and waited but Coyote never came.

  Next day it was Old Beaver’s turn to go hunting. He went to tell Old Coyote Woman that she must wait for him, for he was going to hunt rabbits for her. “All right,” she said. And he killed so many that he could hardly carry them.

  In the morning Beaver came into Coyote’s house and said, “Old Coyote Woman, here are the rabbits.” She took them and said, “Thank you, thank you, Old Man Beaver.”

  They went straight into the inner room, and Old Man Coyote was left by himself in the front room. He was very angry. They gave him his supper, and when he had finished, they went in to bed.

  Old Beaver Man started to have intercourse with Old Coyote Woman. Old Coyote Woman cried out, and Old Coyote called out, “Old Beaver, don’t hurt my wife.” Old Coyote Woman answered, “Shut up, Old Man Coyote! It’s because I like it that I’m crying out.”

  When he had finished, Old Beaver Man came out. He said to Old Coyote, “We won’t keep bad feelings against each other; this was your plan. I shall always wait for you at my house whenever you want to visit me.” And they were as good neighbors as ever.

  —Recorded by Ruth Benedict in 1931.

  THE SERPENT OF THE SEA

  [ZUNI]

  “Let us abide with the ancients tonight!” exclaims the elder.

  “Be it well,” reply the listeners.

  In the times of our forefathers there was a village under Thunder Mountain called Home of the Eagles. It is now in ruins: the roofs gone, the ladders decayed, the hearths cold. But when it was alive, it was the home of a beautiful maiden, the daughter of the priest-chief. Though beautiful, she had one strange trait: she could not endure the slightest speck of dust or dirt upon her clothes or person.

  A sacred spring of water lay at the foot of the terrace on which the town stood. Now we call it the Pool of the Apaches, but then it was sacred to Kolowissi, the Serpent of the Sea. Washing her clothes and bathing herself over and over, the maiden spent almost all her time at this spring. The defilement of his waters, their contamination by the dirt of her apparel and the dun of her person, angered Kolowissi. He devised a plan to punish her.

  When the maiden next came to the spring, she was startled to find a smiling baby boy gurgling and splashing in the water. Of course it was the Sea Serpent who, like the other gods, can assume any form at his pleasure. The girl looked all around—north, south, east, and west—but saw no trace of a person who might have left the beautiful child. “Whose can it be?” she wondered. “Only a cruel mother would leave her baby here to die!”

  The maiden talked softly to the child, took him in her arms, and carried him up the hill to her house. There she brought him into her room, where she lived apart from her family because of her loathing of dust and dirt. As she played with him, laughing at his pranks and smiling into his face, he answered her in baby fashion with coos and smiles of his own.

  Meanwhile her younger sisters had prepared the evening meal and were waiting for her. “Where can she be?” they asked.

  “Probably at the spring, as usual!” said their father. “Run down and call her.”

  But the youngest sister could not find her at the spring, so she came home and climbed to the maiden’s private room at the top of the house. And there the maiden was, sitting on the floor and playing with the beautiful baby.

  On hearing this the father was silent and thoughtful, for he knew that the waters of the spring were sac
red. When the rest of the family started to climb the ladder to see the child, he called them back.

  “Do you suppose any real mother would leave her baby in a spring?” he said. “This is not as simple as it seems.” And since the maiden would not leave the child, they ate without her.

  Upstairs the baby began to yawn. Growing drowsy herself, the girl put him on the bed and fell asleep beside him.

  The maiden’s sleep was real, the baby’s a pretense. He lay quietly and began to lengthen, drawing himself out, extending longer and longer. Slowly the Serpent of the Sea appeared, like a nightmare come true. He was so huge that he had to coil himself round and round the room, filling it with scaly, gleaming circles. Placing his enormous head near the maiden’s, Kolowissi surrounded her with his coils and finally took his own tail into his mouth.

  So the night passed. In the morning when breakfast was ready and the oldest sister had not come down, the others grew impatient.

  “Now that she has the child, nothing else matters to her,” the old man said. “A baby is enough to absorb any woman’s attention.”

  But the smallest sister climbed up to the room and called her. Receiving no answer, she pushed the door, first gently and then with all her might. She could not move it and began to be frightened. Running to the skyhole over the room where the others were sitting, she cried for help.

  Everyone except the father rushed up, and pushing together, cracked the door just enough to catch a glimpse of the serpent’s great scales. Then they screamed and ran back down.

  The father, priest and sage that he was, told them quietly, “I expected as much. I thought it was impossible for a woman to be so foolish as to leave her child in a spring. But it’s not impossible, it seems, for another woman to be so foolish as to take such a child to her bosom.”

  Climbing up to her room, he pushed against the door and called, “Oh Kolowissi, it is I who speak to you—I, your priest. I pray you, let my child come to me again, and I will make atonement for her errors. She is yours; but let her return to us once more.”

  Hearing this, the Serpent of the Sea began to loosen his coils. The whole building, the whole village, shook violently, and everyone trembled with fear.

  At last the maiden awoke and cried piteously for help. As the coils unwound, she was able to rise. The great serpent bent the folds of his body nearest the doorway so that they formed an arch for her to pass under. She was half stunned by the din of the monster’s scales, which rasped against one another like the scraping of flints under the feet of a rapid runner.

  Once clear of the writhing mass, the maiden was away like a deer. Tumbling down the ladder and into the room below, she threw herself on her mother’s breast.

  But the priest remained, praying to the serpent. He ended with: “It shall be as I have said; she is yours!”

  He and the two warrior-priests of the town called together all the other priests in sacred council. Performing the solemn rites, they prepared plumes, prayer wands, and offerings of treasure. After four days of ceremonies, the old priest called his daughter and told her that she must give these offerings, together with the most precious of them all, herself, to the Serpent of the Sea. She must renounce her people and her home and dwell in the house of Kolowissi in the Waters of the World.

  “Your deeds tell me,” said her father, “that this has been your desire. For you brought this fate on yourself by using the sacred water for profane purposes.”

  The maiden wept and clung to her mother’s neck. Then, shivering with terror, she left her childhood home. In the plaza they dressed her in sacred cotton robes, elaborately embroidered, and adorned her with earrings, bracelets, beads, and other precious things. Amidst the lamentations of the people, they painted her cheeks with red spots as if for a dance. They made a road of sacred meal toward the distant spring known as the Doorway of the Serpent of the Sea. Four steps toward this spring they marked out sacred terraces on the ground at the west of the plaza. And when they had finished the sacred road, the old priest, without one tear, told his daughter to walk out on it and call the serpent to come.

  At once the door opened and the Serpent of the Sea descended from the maiden’s room, where he had been waiting. Without using ladders, he lowered his head and breast down to the ground in great undulations. He placed his heavy head on the maiden’s shoulder, and the priests said, “It is time.”

  Slowly, cowering beneath her burden, the maiden started toward the west. Whenever she staggered with fear and weariness and was about to wander from the path, the serpent gently pushed her onward and straightened her course.

  They went toward the river trail and followed it, then crossed over the Mountain of the Red Paint, and still the serpent was not completely uncoiled from the maiden’s room. Not until they were past the mountain did his tail emerge.

  Suddenly Kolowissi drew himself together and began to assume a new shape. Before long his serpent form contracted and shortened until he lifted his head from the maiden’s shoulder and stood up, a beautiful young man in sacred ceremonial dress! He slipped his serpent scales, now grown small, under his flowing mantle. In the snake’s hoarse hiss he said: “Are you tired, girl?” She never replied, but plodded on with her eyes cast down.

  In a gentler voice he said, “Are you weary, poor maiden?” Rising taller, walking a little behind her, he wrapped his scales more closely in his blanket. He repeated in a still softer voice, “Are you weary, poor maiden?”

  At first she dared not look around, though the voice sounded so changed, so kind. Yet she still felt the weight of the serpent’s head on her shoulder, for she had become used to the heavy burden and could not tell that it had gone. At last, however, she turned and saw a splendid, brave young man, magnificently dressed.

  “May I walk by your side?” he asked. “Why don’t you speak?”

  “I am filled with fear and shame,” said she.

  “Why? What do you fear?”

  “I came away from my home with a terrifying creature, and he rested his head upon my shoulder, and even now I feel it there.” She lifted her hand to the place where it had been, still fearing that she would find it.

  “But I came all the way with you,” said he, “and I saw no such creature.”

  She stopped and looked at him. “You came all the way? Then where has the serpent gone?”

  He smiled and replied, “I know where he has gone.”

  “Ah, my friend, will he leave me alone now? Will he let me return to my people?”

  “No, because he thinks too much of you.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He is here,” said the youth, smiling and placing his hand on his heart. “I am he.”

  “I don’t believe it!” cried the maiden.

  He drew the shriveled serpent scales out from under his mantle. “I am he, and I love you, beautiful maiden! Won’t you come and stay with me? We will live and love one another not just now, but forever, in all the Waters of the World.”

  And as they journeyed on, the maiden quite forgot her sadness, and soon she forgot her home too. She followed her husband into the Doorway of the Serpent of the Sea and lived with him ever after.

  —Based on Frank Hamilton Cushing’s version of 1931.

  Stories about tricks and pranks, especially when played by the lowly, small, and poor on the proud, big, and rich, have delighted audiences from the dawn of storytelling. In Europe, Reynard the Fox (or the German Reinecke Fuchs) is the trickster par excellence, whose exploits were related by illiterate storytellers on market days or written down in elaborate form by some of the world’s great authors.

  The trickster is a rebel against authority and the breaker of all taboos. He is what the best-behaved and most circumspect person may secretly wish to be. He is, especially in the western areas of North America, at the same time imp and hero—the great culture bringer who can also make mischief beyond belief, turning quickly from clown to creator and back again.

  In Indian America it is not
the fox but Coyote who is the great trickster. His exploits are recounted from Alaska down to the southern deserts, from the Atlantic all the way to the Pacific Coast. Raven, Mink, Rabbit, Blue Jay, and other animals also take their turn playing the prankster and troublemaker. Besides animals, there are human or semihuman tricksters—Old Man of the Blackfeet and Crow, Iktome the Sioux Spider Man, Veeho or Vihio of the Cheyenne, Manabozho of the central woodlands and Great Lakes regions, and Whisky Jack of the Cree and Saultaux. Even when a tribe has another such trickster of its own, Coyote often appears as his comrade and fellow mischief-maker.

  In the Plains and plateau areas, where Coyote takes center stage, most tales bear witness to his cleverness alternating with buffoonery, his lechery, his craft in cheating and destroying his enemy, and his voracious appetite and unending need to keep poaching game. In the North Pacific Coast area, the emphasis is more on Coyote’s cleverness than his stupidity. Coyote often poses as a woman and marries a man (presumably to be fed and taken care of); he also transforms himself into a fish so he can steal a valuable harpoon or fishhook. His gluttony and lust are well represented, too. In all regions, Coyote periodically gets his comeuppance—even if, as in one story here, it takes several lifetimes.

  Shorn of the various surface features from different cultures, Coyote and his kin represent the sheerly spontaneous in life, the pure creative spark that is our birthright as human beings and that defies fixed roles or behavior. He not only represents some primordial creativity from our earlier days, but he reminds us that such celebration of life goes on today, and he calls us to join him in the frenzy. In an ordered world of objects and labels, he represents the potency of nothingness, of chaos, of freedom—a nothingness that makes something of itself. There is great power in such a being, and it has always been duly recognized and honored by Indian people.