Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/386

 drought parched the land, during which a famous coyote and his two sons ate many grasshoppers—all the animal life there was left. The only water was in Clear Lake, and thither they journeyed. The sons died on the way, but the father reached the lake and drank it dry. Then he lay down and fell asleep. As he slept, there came a man from the south and pricked him with a spear, so that the waters flowed forth from him and returned to the lake until it was full again, while the grasshoppers he had eaten became fishes. There are other legends accounting for this deep and beautiful piece of water in which the coyote is made to exercise supreme functions.

In the early days of the earth, as a Gallinomero philosopher will teach you, all Nature was wrapped in darkness, and there was dire confusion and endless collisions, one of which brought the coyote and hawk together. Instead of indulging idle recriminations, they consulted how they could improve this state of things. The coyote groped his way into a swamp and gathered a quantity of dry tules which he rolled into a large ball. This he gave to the hawk, with some flints, and sent him up into heaven with it, where he touched it off and sent it whirling round the earth. This was the sun. The moon they made in the same way, only the tules happened to be damp and did not burn so well. There is a legend current among the Papagos on the Gila River, Arizona, of a deluge from which only their great myth-hero Montezuma (not to be confounded with the veritable Aztec emperor whom Cortes saw) and the coyote escaped. The coyote had foretold this deluge, and Montezuma had hollowed out a canoe, while the coyote prepared for himself an ark in a hollow cane.

The Ashochimi preserve a legend of a flood which drowned all living creatures except the coyote. Seeking out over all the world the sites of the antediluvian villages, he gathered the floating tail-feathers of hawks, owls, and buzzards, and planted one wherever a wigwam had stood. In due time these feathers sprouted, branched, and finally turned into men and women.

The Pitt-River (California) Indians have a somewhat similar story. Their coyote began the earth by scratching it up out of nothingness. Then the eagle complained that he had no perch, whereupon the coyote scratched up great ridges. When the eagle flew over them his feathers dropped down, took root, and became trees, and the pin-feathers bushes and plants. After men had been created, they were freezing for want of fire, stole some of it, and kindled a fire in the mountains, to which the Indians resorted. The Shastika say that originally the sun had nine brothers flaming hot with fire, so that the world was likely to perish, but the coyote slew them, and saved mankind from burning up. There were ten moons also, all made of ice, so that in the night people nearly froze to death. Nine of these the coyote slew with his flint knife, carrying heated stones to keep his hands warm.

The Miwok possess a very elaborate myth of the creation of man, in