to have no way, no nature, no fixed instinctual responses. Having no way, trickster can have many ways. Having no way, he is dependent on others whose manner he exploits, but he is not confined to their manner and therefore in another sense he is more independent. Having no way, he is free of the trap of instinct, both “stupider than the animals” and more versatile than any. He stumbles around covered in his own filth, but by the same token he feeds in the house of Kingfisher, and the house of Bear, the house of Muskrat, the house of Bee. Moreover, if someone tries to trap him to bring him home for dinner, trickster can counter with a series of deceptions and slip from the trap. Bee and Bear, who cannot tell a lie, are easier to trap than Grouse, who has her single famous fib. But Grouse is easier to trap than trickster, whose fabulations never end.
In fact, we must now add creative lying to our list of trickster’s inventions. Trickster discovers creative fabulation, feigning, and fibbing, the playful construction of fictive worlds. It is trickster who invents the gratuitous untruth. In Northern California, the Maidu creation myth has several creators who collaborate to make the world, including a beneficent Earth-Initiate and a bungling Coyote. At one point Coyote laughs just when Earth-Initiate has warned him not to. Called to account, Coyote says, “Oh no, that wasn’t me who laughed.” This was the first lie.
HALLMARKS OF TRICKSTER'S MIND
The fish swims through its expansive, watery world and suddenly trickster blocks its passage, makes its world less expansive, less fluid. If the fish itself is tricky, if it has the wit to slip the trap, it will do so by finding a breach in the wickerwork, a rip in the net, an escape hatch its enemy has not noticed. Either way, we have a first mark of trickster’s cunning: it closes off a passage to capture its prey, or it finds a hole to elude its foe. It can seize an opportunity or block an opportunity.
I say “opportunity” because there is an old link between that word and the open passage a fish trap blocks. In The Origins of European Thought, Richard Onians explains that “opportunity” comes from the Latin porta, which is an “entrance” or “passage through.” The word is associated with doors and entranceways (portal, porch, portico), and an opportunus, then, is what offers an opening, or what stands before an opening, ready to go through. For the Romans, a porta fenestella was a special opening that allowed Fortune to enter. The Greek root is poros, which is a passageway for ships but also any passageway, including one through the skin, that is, a pore. Poroi are all the passages that allow fluids to flow in and out of the body. A pore, a portal, a doorway, a nick in time, a gap in the screen, a looseness in the weave—these are all opportunities in the ancient sense. Each being in the world must find the set of opportunities fitted to its nature. The giant’s pathway is often blocked, but bacterial landscapes are almost pure poroi. The briar patch is a wide-open field for Brer Rabbit. Darkness is opportunity to the owl and bat, water is opportunity to the fish—until some fish trap blocks the way.
But let us leave these etymological haunts and return to trickster’s opportunistic craft. A good example immediately follows “Raven Becomes Voracious” in the Tsimshian Raven cycle. Remember that before Raven acquires his appetite the world is covered in darkness, and that when he arrives in this world to distribute the fish and edible berries, he finds the people distressed by this endless night. He’s distressed, too—after all, how will he feed himself if it’s always dark? Remembering that there was light in the heaven from which he has come, Raven resolves to return and steal it.
Putting on his raven skin, he flies upward until he finds the hole in the sky. Entering it, he takes off his raven skin and goes to sit by a spring near the house of the chief of heaven. There he waits until the chief’s daughter comes to fetch water, whereupon Raven changes himself into a leaf from a cedar tree; the girl swallows him when she drinks the water. She becomes pregnant and bears a child. Her family is delighted; they wash the boy regularly and soon he has grown enough to crawl around the lodge. But all the time he cries. As he crawls he cries out, “Hama, hama!” and the great chief becomes troubled. He summons his wise men to help him quiet the child. One of them understands that the child wants the box that hangs on the wall of the chief’s lodge, the box where daylight is kept. They put it on the floor by the fire and the child stops crying. He rolls the Daylight-Box around the house for several days, occassionally carrying it to the door. One day, when the people have more or less forgotten about him, he shoulders the box and makes a dash for the hole in the sky. The family gives chase but before they can catch him he slips on his raven skin and flies down to the earth. There he breaks the box and now, thanks to Raven the thief, we have daylight in this world.
Perhaps all theft is opportunity theft in the sense that where something is protected a thief needs a break or pore in the guard through which to enter and carry off the goods. The hole in the sky that frames this part of the Tsimshian Raven cycle is only one of several such pores Raven finds or creates. For one thing, he slips into the family by finding, as it were, a porous woman and a way to enter her. As a crying baby he then subverts the group’s defenses (as con artists sometimes use their children to soften up the mark). All good people are vulnerable to the helpless, unhappy child. If Raven had approached the lodge armed with weapons and demanding the Daylight-Box in a loud voice, he would have had a fight on his hands. But as a helpless babe he is not only welcomed and washed, he is actually given the prize. Trickster, then, is a poreseeker. He keeps a sharp eye out for naturally occurring opportunities and creates them ad hoc when they do not occur by themselves.
Now let’s reverse the picture and come back to trickster as trapper. As opportunism is a part of this cunning, so, too, is the blocking of opportunity, and to block opportunity one needs to create the impenetrable or non-porous, the net so fine there is no way to slip through. Natural history provides many examples of such pore-blocking wit at work. One of my favorites is the method that humpback whales use to trap the tiny fish they feed on. When the humpback whale comes upon a school of herring, it dives deep and then swims in a slow circle, exhaling all the while, so that a cone of bubbles rises through the water. The herring in the school misperceive this “bubble net” as a barrier through which they cannot swim. Having confined the school, the whale then rises through the center of the bubble net, its mouth open and filling with fish.
The octopus has a similar trick, only this one is used defensively. When threatened by a predator, the octopus darkens the water with a jet of ink, turning transparency into a murky, impenetrable, non-porous medium. In both cases, of course, the impenetrability is an illusion. The darkness around the octopus is only an artificial night; the herring are trapped not by bubbles but by their own defenses and perceptive limitations. Still, in each case the artifice suffices.
Trickster himself plays with the porous and non-porous in any number of tales that focus on tunnels and burrowing animals. Remember that the Zulu trickster Thlókunyana is a small being associated with the weasel. In one story, he has moved into the leopard’s household, tricked the mother leopard, and eaten her children. Knowing he will eventually be discovered, Thlókunyana makes himself an escape route, a long tunnel with a distant, hidden outlet. When the leopard finally realizes what has happened to her children, Thlókunyana disappears into his hole. The leopard follows, thinking the burrow has a single entrance and Thlókunyana will easily be trapped. But before the leopard knows what’s happening, wily Thlókunyana has come out his secret exit, doubled back, and set spears around both entrances; when the baffled leopard emerges she is killed. In a common North American version of this “tunnel trick,” Coyote lures his enemy into a tunnel, then builds fires at each end—trapping his victim and roasting his dinner at the same time.
The initial trick in all such tales is to have made a burrow in the first place. The rabbit with a hole has a pore in the earth, a self-made opportunity to escape the fox. But the animal with a single-entrance burrow is also in danger of being trapped in its own hole, so the second trick is to dig a second entrance, or a third, or fourth. The Greeks thought the fox the epitome of animal cunning and imagined her dwelling to have seven entrances. But no matter how many entrances, we’re still in the
