fish there are mortals who eat constantly. The trickster Raven is a mixture, the shining boy plus appetite, a being of considerable power who is unable to satiate his hunger. Trickster makes the world, gives it sunlight, fish, and berries, but he makes it “as it is,” a world of constant need, work, limitation, and death.
• • •
As I said at the outset, there are not many stories like this one in which we learn something about the genesis of appetite, but trickster tales in most traditions are filled with examples of trickster’s hunger and its consequences. To take a case in point, in a Native American (Colville) story Coyote has made a new pair of horns for Old Buffalo Bull and in gratitude Buffalo gives Coyote a magic cow and a little advice:
“Never kill this cow, Coyote. When you are hungry, cut off a little of her fat with your flint knife. Rub ashes on the wound. The cut will heal. This way, you will have meat forever.”
Coyote promised this is what he would do. He took the buffalo cow with him back over the mountains. Whenever he was hungry he would cut away a little fat and then heal the wound with ashes as Buffalo Bull had said. But after a while he got tired of the fat. He wanted to taste the bone marrow and some fresh liver. By this time he had crossed the plains and was back in his own country.
“What Buffalo Bull said is only good over in his country,” Coyote said to himself. “I am chief here. Buffalo Bull’s words mean nothing. He will never know.”
Coyote took the young cow down to the edge of the creek. “You look a little sore-footed,” he told her. “Stay here and rest and feed for a while.”
Coyote killed her suddenly while she was feeding. When he pulled off her hide crows and magpies came. When Coyote tried to chase them off, more came. Even more came, until they had eaten all the meat …
Coyote ends up empty-handed and of course his magic cow is dead and there’s nothing he can do about it. The plot is typical: the trickster is given something valuable with a condition set on its use, time passes, and before too long trickster’s hunger leads him to violate the condition. As a consequence, the plenitude of things is inexorably diminished. Hunger devours the ideal, and trickster suffers. There seem to be only two options: limited food or limited appetite. Coyote, unable to choose the latter, has the former forced upon him. Such is one common plot in the mythology of tricksters.
But this mythology always seems to go in two directions at once, and so at times we find the opposite plot as well, one in which trickster has limits to appetite forced upon him. I am thinking in particular of the trickster cycle told by the Winnebago Indians in Wisconsin, several episodes of which amount to a sort of “Raven Becomes Voracious” in reverse.* At the beginning of the Winnebago cycle, trickster is pictured as having a long penis coiled in a box on his back, and his intestines wrapped around his body, an apt image of someone ridden by appetite. In the course of the story, however, these bizarre organs are reduced and rearranged until trickster looks more or less like a human being.
In the episode concerning his intestines, trickster has caught some ducks and set them roasting. He plans to nap while they cook, but before settling down he addresses his anus: “Now, you, my younger brother, must keep watch for me while I go to sleep. If you notice any people, drive them off.” As soon as trickster falls asleep, some small foxes, having scented the meat, come to steal it; the anus farts at them, but they pay it no mind and eat their fill. When trickster awakes he discovers the meat is gone and cries out:
“Alas! Alas! They have caused my appetite to be disappointed, those covetous fellows! And you, too [he says to his anus], you despicable object, what about your behavior? Did I not tell you to watch this fire? You shall remember this! As a punishment for your remissness, I will burn your mouth so that you will not be able to use it!”
Thereupon he took a burning piece of wood and burnt the mouth of his anus. He was, of course, burning himself and, as he applied the fire, he exclaimed, “Ouch! Ouch! This is too much! I have made my skin smart. Is it not for such things that they call me Trickster? …”
Then he went away. As he walked along the road he felt certain that someone must have passed along it before, for he was on what appeared to be a trail. Indeed, suddenly, he came upon a piece of fat that must have come from someone’s body. “Someone has been packing an animal he had killed,” he thought to himself. Then he picked up a piece of fat and ate it. It had a delicious taste. “My, my, how delicious it is to eat this!”
As he proceeded however, much to his surprise, he discovered that it was part of himself, part of his own intestines, that he was eating. After burning his anus, his intestines had contracted and fallen off, piece by piece, and these pieces were the things he was picking up. “My, my! Correctly, indeed, am I named Foolish One, Trickster! …” Then he tied his intestines together. A large part, however, had been lost.
In this way, trickster’s intestines become normal.* As for his penis, it is also a little oversized at the beginning of the story. He has trouble with it lifting his blanket up like a tent pole, and he can send it like a snake under the water to copulate with a chief’s daughter bathing in the river. But late in the cycle he hears a voice teasing him about how strange his penis looks. He becomes self-conscious about the weird shape of his body, and begins to rearrange himself, placing his penis and testicles where they belong on the human body. At the same time, he is angered by the teasing voice, which turns out to come from a chipmunk. When the chipmunk runs into a hollow tree, trickster sends his penis in after it.
So he took out his penis and probed the hollow tree with it. He could not, however, reach the end of the hole. So he took some more of his penis and probed again, but again he was unable to reach the end of the hole. So he unwound more and more of his penis and probed still deeper, yet all to no avail. Finally he took what still remained, emptying the entire box, and probed and probed but still he could not reach the end of the hole. At last he sat up on a log and probed as far as he could, but still he was unable to reach the end. “Ho!” said he impatiently, and suddenly withdrew his penis. Much to his horror, only a small piece of it was left. “My, what a great injury he has done me! You contemptible thing I will repay you for this!”
Then he kicked the log to pieces. There he found the chipmunk and flattened him out, and there, too, to his horror he discovered his penis all gnawed up. “Oh, my, of what a wonderful organ he has deprived me! But why do I speak thus? I will make objects out of the pieces for human beings to use.”*
Trickster transforms the pieces of his penis into edible plants—potatoes, artichokes, rice, ground beans, and so on. In many tales when trickster loses his intestines they, too, become plants that humans can eat. That is, when trickster’s organs of appetite are diminished they are turned into foodstuffs, the objects of human appetite. Such foods are a mixed blessing, giving rise to hunger even as they satisfy it. To end our craving we must eat the organs of craving, and craving then returns. If the foods that nourish us are trickster’s gifts, to eat them is to become like trickster, like that Raven who can never be satisfied and who would devour all the provisions of his native village were he not banished to this world.
The general point here is that a trickster will be less ridden by lust and hunger if his organs of appetite have been whittled away. In this case, trickster simply suffers the loss; it happens to him. He may benefit from it, but the benefit is accidental, not a fruit of his own cunning or design. But perhaps the accident leads to the cunning. That is to say, just as trickster may acquire his trapping wits as a consequence of having been trapped, so the suffering that trickster
