The Devil in Coyote
There was a story told to all the little girls I knew—we never quite could pin down who was the first to tell it, or the first to hear it, and we could never quite figure out what the story was meant to tell us. All we heard from our Aunties and Mothers and Grannies was this:
Coyote is overjoyed to learn that his eldest son is going to take a bride. He prepares a potlatch, seven courses of feasting. He brings in all the greatest dancers he knows from all the tribes. He prays to the ancestors that his son will have all the children he desires. And then he meets his son’s wife-to-be, a young girl of immense beauty and not much brains.
Coyote decides to seduce his son’s woman. On the eve of their wedding, Coyote calls to his son and says “Son, see up upon that tree?”
His son looks to the top of a towering tree and sees a beautiful bird, one too lovely to be of this world. He looks to his father and nods. Coyote says to him “Son, I wish you to climb to the top of that tree and bring me down that bird so this old man can have a memento of the other world.”
Coyote’s son diligently started to climb the strong young tree, figuring it to be no more than thirty feet high where the bird is. He climbs to the thirty feet, reaches his hand out for the bird, and sees it another ten feet above. He climbs the next ten feet, and again finds the bird beyond his reach. Once more, another ten feet, another disappointment, on and on.
As his son laboured, pine-sticky hands always reaching for one more branch, Coyote pulled back the ancient folds of his wrinkled skin and bound it tight with leather strips behind his head, showing the world a face that was as like his young son’s as his own.
He went to the home of his soon-to-be-daughter-in-law and stood before her, as like his son as two peas in a pod. She looks at him and takes his hand, smiling her lovely smile as she would to her husband to be.
In some endings told to us, her husband climbs down the tree and saves her from his father. Sometimes he realizes his father’s treachery before it’s too late. Sometimes he doesn’t realize it before he climbs as high as the moon, where the woman who bore Raven tells him of another tricksters scheme. Sometimes he doesn’t realize at all and keeps climbing.
My grandma would never tell me which ending was true.
“I never knew much about the devil until I met him.”
This was the famous beginning to Nookomis’ famous story.