must come over to see me tomorrow,” said Coyote.
“I don’t think I will come over,” said Kingfisher.
“Oh, you must come over. We will have a nice meal, you will like it. You come over tomorrow.”
Kingfisher didn’t want to go, but said he would.
The next day when Kingfisher came over Coyote told his son to go get three willow sticks. When Boy Coyote came back Coyote stuck the sticks in the fire until they were hard. Then he bent them up and stuck them on his belt. Then Coyote crawled up to the top of his lodge.
“What are you doing up there?” asked his wife.
“Why, you know I’ve done this before. I am getting food for our brother, Kingfisher.”
Coyote jumped off the top of the lodge down to the river but he missed the hole and broke his neck and was killed.
Kingfisher had been watching all the time. He walked over to where Coyote lay and took the three sticks from his belt and jumped into the hole in the ice. Soon he came up with many fish. Then he stepped over Coyote four times and Coyote came back to life.
“This is my way, not your way,” said Kingfisher. “I do not imitate others like you do.”
Coyote took the fish up to his lodge and showed them to Mole and to his children.
“Look at these big fish. I caught them the way Kingfisher did. Kingfisher is afraid of my power. He told me not to do this again. He knows my medicine is strong.”
Mole cooked the fish.
Two things—the stories just cited about “species knowledge” and the fact that one of trickster’s names is “imitator”—lead me to read “The Bungling Host” as a tale of an animal that does not have, as Kingfisher says, “a way.” Kingfisher, Snipe, Polecat, Bear, Muskrat—each of these animals has a way of being in the world; each has his nature. Specifically, each of them has his own way of hunting and, in these stories at least, he is never hungry, because he has that way. Coyote, on the other hand, seems to have no way, no nature, no knowledge. He has the ability to copy the others, but no ability of his own.
This lack has several consequences. For one thing it means, as Carl Jung put it, that trickster is “stupider than the animals.” Animals at least have inborn knowledge, a way of being, and trickster doesn’t. The animals know not to eat that plant that causes them to defecate mountains; the animals know which way the river is; the animals know how to hunt for their particular foods. Trickster knows none of this, and so ends up hungry, stumbling around covered in his own mess.*
It seems a dangerous position for an animal to be in, stripped of instinct. What possible use could there be in having lost the mother wit to be in the world? What conceivable advantage might lie in a way of being that has no way?
A first answer might be that whoever has no way but is a successful imitator will have, in the end, a repertoire of ways. If we can imitate the spider and make a net, imitate the beaver and make a lake, imitate the heron’s beak and make a spear, imitate the armadillo and wear armor, imitate the leopard and wear camouflage, imitate poison ivy and produce chemical weapons, imitate the fox and hunt downwind, then we become more versatile hunters, greater hunters. And although in “The Bungling Host” trickster fails as an imitator, elsewhere imitation is part of his power.
Perhaps having no way also means that a creature can adapt itself to a changing world. Species well situated in a natural habitat are always at risk if that habitat changes. One reason native observers may have chosen coyote the animal to be Coyote the Trickster is that the former in fact does exhibit a great plasticity of behavior and is, therefore, a consummate survivor in a shifting world. For one thing, coyote young, like human young, remain dependent on their parents for a long time. One naturalist writes that such neoteny, as it is called, “is a characteristic of all species that have not inherited a fixed repertory of behavior, but must learn how to survive … The neotenal coyote … meets change by learning new responses and is therefore capable of developing a whole new lifestyle.” As if by way of illustration, another naturalist, François Leydet, tells us that, in the early days of the American West, coyotes were much more social animals; they hunted in packs the way wolves do. But now
big gatherings of coyotes are seldom seen … Persecution forced the coyote to adopt more solitary ways, and since he subsists largely on small game that he can catch unassisted, he has been able to do so. This has allowed him to survive in regions where the big gray wolf has been exterminated: a hunter of large game, Canis lupus would not or could not abandon the pack organization which made him highly vulnerable to man.
Watching coyotes hunt in packs, the eighteenth-century wolf might well have said to them, “This is my way, not your way.” But two hundred years later the wolf, trapped in his “way,” is endangered, while coyotes are eating purebred poodles in Beverly Hills.
So this is one advantage a being, especially a predator, might have if it is not constrained to one way but has instead the ability to copy many ways. We can turn the conceit around, too, and find situations in which a being that is hunted might benefit from having no way, no instinctual knowledge. To set up this line of thought, let me begin with a question: Do animals lie?
The answer is both yes and no. Animals of course communicate with one another. Birds call from the trees, whales sing in the oceans, the deer gives its hoarse warning cry, or—to take the famous example—the honeybee dances to tell the hive how far away the flowers are, and in what direction. Moreover, in most cases these animals are telling the “truth” when they communicate with one another. Honeybees do not lie. Their “language” is constrained by instinct; no bee ever comes into the hive and says “The flowers are due west” when in fact they are northeast. The deer does not cry wolf when there is no wolf at hand.
Having granted all that, however, it is not hard to think of complications and exceptions. Surely there are deceptive animals. There are insects evolved to look as if they are twigs or dead leaves; there are flowers that eat insects by luring them with false advertising. In the Louisiana swamps, one finds the remarkable alligator snapping turtle, one of whose features is a “lure tongue,” a stubby white appendage which it sticks out until an unsuspecting fish checks to see if it’s edible. The frightened possum pretends to be dead, as does the pangolin. In the classic case, when the fox threatens the mother grouse, she pretends to have a broken wing so as to lead the fox away from her nest. Small birds feeding at ground level in the rain forests give a warning cry when danger is near, but one species can give a false warning cry, so as to have the ground to itself for a while.
So animals sometimes lie. But there is an important way in which these lying animals are just like animals that do not lie: both are constrained by instinct. The lying animal cannot lie creatively; it cannot vary its repertoire. The mother grouse never plays possum and the possum never plays grouse.
Such constraint makes lying animals vulnerable to any predator that gets wise to the ruse. Here we return to the first part of the chapter, for any animal bound by instinct is vulnerable to what I call “technicians of instinct.” As there are traps of appetite, so there are traps of instinct, traps that exploit an animal’s inborn methods, including the methods by which it otherwise eludes its enemies (as when Coyote turns the Buffalo’s fleetness against it). In short, an animal with one instinctual deception in its repertoire has some advantage over an animal with none, but that advantage is lost when it meets a predator who knows how to decipher the deception. Then it is stuck, trapped in its own defense.
So
