Coyote

The coyote is one of the great trickster figures of Native North American storytelling, appearing across the traditions of the Southwest, California, the Great Basin and the Plains as a being who is at once creator and fool, benefactor and appetite. In many story-cycles Coyote helps to shape the world, to bring fire or light or death into being, and to teach; in the same breath he is greedy, lecherous, boastful and forever undone by his own schemes, a figure whose disasters are told to entertain and to instruct. He is neither simply good nor simply evil but ambivalent, embodying the disorderly, creative and unpredictable in the world.

Something genuinely unusual happened to the coyote in the twentieth century: rather than retreating before human settlement as most large North American predators did, it expanded, moving east and north across the continent as wolves were exterminated from most of their range and removed a major competitor and predator of coyotes themselves; coyotes are now established in every American state except Hawaii and throughout Mexico and Canada, including within major cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles, an ecological success story that sits oddly beside the animal's long reputation as an outwitted fool in its own stories.

Scholars of religion place Coyote among the tricksters, a widespread type that also includes the raven, the hare and the spider in other traditions, whose stories break rules and cross boundaries in order, often, to establish them. These tales belong to living peoples, and many are tied to season, place and ceremony, told in particular ways at particular times; they are described here from the published record and in general terms, without claiming any closed, sacred or initiatory knowledge, and set apart from the modern popular notion of a personal spirit-animal, which is not what these traditions mean. Creator and clown, wise and foolish, Coyote carries the trickster's double truth: that the world is made and unmade by the same unruly force.

The English word itself preserves the animal's Mesoamerican standing: coyote comes from the Nahuatl coyotl by way of Spanish, one of a substantial number of English loanwords, alongside chocolate, tomato and avocado, that trace back to the Aztec language, a linguistic trace of how thoroughly Nahua ideas about this particular animal travelled north with the word for it. The coyote's range has itself performed a kind of trickster's reversal since European colonisation: originally confined chiefly to the western and central plains, it has since spread across virtually the whole of North America, including major eastern cities, interbreeding with wolves and dogs along the way to produce the larger hybrid populations some call coywolves.