On the basis of her experience as a collector of ‘myth’ from the Zuñi pueblo in the southwestern United States, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict has written so forcefully about the ethnic idiosyncracy of oral fable that one dare not pass over her collection when trying to ascertain the generic features which native American folklore shares with that of peoples elsewhere. One distinctively Zuñi story in her collection was The Hunter Transformed into Coyote. The version of this Zuñi pueblo tale which she collected and published was, she said, “particularly satisfactory from the point of view of the Zuñi story teller.” It gave satisfaction because, as she commented, much of its content occurred also in other Zuñi stories, and because the arrangement of that content in her version gave especial scope to elaboration of narrative incidents that were well-known and widely liked among members of the Zuñi pueblo. The familiarity and ready acceptability of her version’s content to the Zuñi mind marked it as typically Zuñi folklore to Benedict’s way of thinking:
The Transformation into Coyote is a favorite Zuñi incident and enters into a number of plots. It is the conclusion of Deer Boy, in three of the four Zuñi versions...; it is the conclusion of a tale of the despised child who gains a patron in Coyote and becomes a great hunter..., and in this [version] it is the initial incident of a contest with a false friend. The present version is particularly satisfactory from the point of view of the Zuñi story teller because it gives opportunity for developing the theme of the hunter’s revenge upon his false friend, a theme implied in the incident but not possible to develop when the incident is used as a conclusion. In the present tale, on the other hand, the revenge upon the false friend becomes the climax... . The hunter’s life with the hospitable Spider Woman and her grandchild, the pursuit by Toothed Vagina Woman, and the Killed by cohabitation are introduced as experiences of the hunter’s exile from human intercourse, and he obtains the power of Echo Man to turn his enemy into a like impersonation, a favorite incident.157a
But whereas Ruth Benedict discerned in such Zuñi tales as this the quintessence of Zuñi taste and Zuñi-ness, we must discern in the Zuñi Hunter Transformed into Coyote the essence of its broader humanity, namely the international and prehistoric narrative pattern (among others) of the Two Trees and the food-trickster that unite it firmly with the ancient and universal human tradition of oral fable. For in the final analysis, even ethnic uniqueness and the incommensurability of every distinct people’s distinctive way of life with any other is itself an oral traditional fiction persisting in ancient and universal patterns of fable no different in kind from the Two Trees or the other fabulous patterns treated in this book. The names, the sequences, and the motifs in Ruth Benedict’s favorite Zuñi story are incontestibly Zuñi, but the tale itself is the one, familiar to all mankind, about hunger and food, concealment and discovery, donation and price, unity and rift, reversal of fortune, trickster and arch-trickster, the green wood and the hewn...
Two hunters, the one consanguineously and the other fictively related to the same girl, go hunting together, but their ostensible shared purpose of obtaining food from the wild is soon displaced by a deep rivalry in acts of transformation, hiding, and disclosure. Emotional impetuosity, gratuity, and a specious unity that is soon shattered develop as usual under a standing tree:
The people were living at Matsaka. The hunter was handsome and his father was loved by all the people. He had a close friend. One day they went hunting. The handsome boy went to his brother’s house. His (friend’s) sister was making cornmeal mush balls. His brother said, “Sister, is our lunch ready?” “Yes.” She rolled the mush balls in the boy’s blanket. The boy said to his friend, “I am ready now, brother.” They went to the south to Slit Rocks and separated to hunt for rabbits. The handsome boy killed eight and returned first to the meeting place. He fell asleep waiting for his friend. The witch boy killed only three. He came back and saw his friend asleep under the tree with eight rabbits. He said to himself, “I wish I had your rabbits. When you wake up I will ask you to give me three of your catch.” He touched the boy. “Did you come?” “Yes. I think people at home will be waiting for us.” They ate their musb balls. The witch boy said, “Brother, how did you kill so many?” “My eyes are straight.” “Give me three. I am ashamed to go in and let the people see that I have three and you have eight.” The handsome boy made no answer. He got up and laid one of his rabbits beside the witch boy’s three. Immediately he started for home. He was angry. When they reached the pueblo the hunter did not stop in his friend’s house. The witch boy thought to himself, “I was jealous when he killed so many rabbits but I will not think of that any more.” He took his rabbit blanket and threw it about him and went to his friend’s house. The hunters’ father and mother received him kindly. The witch boy said, “Shall we hunt again tomorrow?” “Yes.” “Come to my house tomorrow.” “Yes.” “We shall go to sleep now so that we shall be fresh in the morning.” The boy went to his own house.
To alleviate the inequity of portion at the green tree in the wilderness, the witch boy next day adopts a strategem with hewn (cedar and yucca) wood. Formerly a bosom friend, witch boy suddenly and stealthily becomes the handsome hunter’s enemy in an unexpected reversal of attitude. His enmity is expressed in a seemingly kindly act of largesse (helping the handsome hunter to a prodigiously bountiful taking of game); but the apparent benevolence conceals an actual malevolence, and instead of being the hunter (or eater), the handsome youth finds himself hunted—in instant jeopardy of being eaten by other, animal hunters—while he himself goes destitute of anything fit to eat:
As soon as be had eaten his morning meal the hunter went to his friend’s house. They went again to Slit Rocks but a little to the east. They separated to hunt. The witch boy bewitched his friend so that he caught nothing. The witch boy also killed nothing. They returned at lunch time and ate their mush balls. The witch boy said, “I know what we can do so that we may kill many rabbits easily.” “What is that?” “I shall teach you.” The witch boy tore a cedar branch and tied it into a hoop with yucca fibre. He hilled up the dirt and set the hoop upright. “I shall teach you, my brother. This is the way we kill rabbits easily.” The witch boy ran through the hoop and immediately he was a coyote. He returned and ran through the hoop again. Immediately he was a person once more. “See what we shall do. There is no danger. When you run through the hoop again you become a person immediately.” “I see.” The hunter ran through the hoop and was transformed into a coyote, and the witch boy also. They went hunting. The hunter killed eighteen rabbits and the witch boy killed ten and they brought them to the tree. The witch boy said, “I am going a little to the west and I shall call you.” When his friend was out of sight the witch boy went back to the hoop and took his own shape again. He tore up the hoop and scattered the branches about. He took all the rabbits they had both killed and started for home. “Ha, you’ve got what you deserved. You hurt my feelings yesterday. Today they are healed.” When he reached his own house he took up eight rabbits and said to his sister, “My sister, take these rabbits to my brother’s father. His son went to hunt with the Kakima people. He will be back in ten days.” His sister took them to the hunter’s house. The father and mother of the hunter greeted her and made her sit down. She said, “My brother has gone to hunt with the Kakima people. My (own) brother brought these rabbits home to you for him.” The father and mother mourned and said, “Poor child, he has to hunt with other people’s lunches. He hasn’t any of his own.”
When Coyote was hungry he came to the place where he had jumped through the hoop. He saw the branches scattered about. All the rabbits were gone. He knew what had happened. He saw the witch boy’s tracks going back to the pueblo. It began to get dark. He lay under the tree. “I wish there were somebody around here. I shall go to find somebody.” His heart was thumping. He ran till he was close to the pueblo. The dogs smelled him and chased him. He ran all the way back to Slit Rocks and lay down. He was tired. In the morning he was starved and thirsty. He ate worms and beetles... .
The witch boy’s timely destruction of the cedar and yucca hoop temporarily arrests the reciprocal effect by which he should experience the same injury he has devised unjustly to punish the friend of whom he is jealous. But the reciprocity persists nonetheless, and is only the more devastating for being delayed. Furthermore, another ritual contraption of cedar and yucca is vehicle of the penalty that is finally visited upon the wrongdoer. The wronged innocent returns from exile to reestablishment of himself and to a civilized revenge against the food-trickster through not one but a series of hewn woods.
Coyote takes refuge at Vulva Spring on Corn Mountain. There Little Spider discovers him and reveals his whereabouts to Spider Grandmother. She uses her stirring stick (hewn) to remove Coyote’s skin and so restore the handsome boy to his proper human form. She also donates her deceased husband’s bow and arrows (hewn) to him, and he goes with Little Spider to hunt birds at Vulva Spring. There Little Spider is frightened and hides while the handsome hunter shoots blue-birds for dinner, but emerges when the killing is over.
Next day the boy attempts more ambitious game—antelope—and proceeds alone beyond the springs on Corn Mountain to Peach Orchard (green). There, from behind a small tree (green), he shoots a first antelope. But portage of the kill is difficult and delays him until with the help of a yucca headband (hewn) he is able to carry it to his foster-home with the Spiders.
Again he hunts antelope on Corn Mountain, but as he is about to shoulder his second kill he notices blood falling onto (rather than from) the meat. Looking up, he sees Toothed Vagina Woman above him in a pinyon tree (green), whence she is dropping her menstrual discharge onto his game. She demands sexual intercourse with him, but he flees through seven ritual performances in seven different settlements until late at night he reaches Goat Man, who subdues the female monster. Next day the hunter returns to Grandmother Spider unharmed.
She sends the hunter to fetch home to her the previous day’s kill of antelope. Then she constructs a rack (hewn) consisting of a long cedar pole (which the hunter supplies) with cross bars of cedar attached by means of yucca fiber. On this the hunter carries the copious jerked meat from his last kill of antelope home to his native place at Matsaka. On the way he obtains a baton (hewn) from Grandfather Echo, and this he uses after his return home to transform his old rival the witch boy permanently into a kachina (spirit being), Echo Man. As part of the ritual whereby Echo Man is irreversibly banished from living Zuñi society to dwell in Kachina Village, the whole population make prayer-sticks (hewn) from willow wands tied with yucca fiber.
Thus in the end hewn wood accomplishes its task as the instrument of civilized equity and reciprocity. As the witch boy used it to punish the great hunter by exiling him to that capacity alone (to be in the form of Coyote nothing else but a hunting creature), so reciprocally the handsome hunter uses it to punish a great usurper of the property of others by banishment to that function alone (to be in the form of Echo Man nothing else but a usurper of others’ voices and utterance). A proper cosmotact, by means of the hewn wood the handsome hunter finally metes out to the ogre of his story the same injury that ogre had theretofore inflicted on others; or, as the Zuñi conteur himself said all the people of Matsaka had said, “‘He started it and now it has happened to him. He has got what he wished to do to other people.’”
The contest of concealments and disclosures is also seven-fold in this Zuñi tale. While he is outward-bound—moving away from his native place at Matsaka towards ever increasing perils and expandingly fabulous monsters—the handsome hunter moves always within the contrast between green and hewn wood. His homeward journey, however, is attended only by hewn wood:
- Green tree: tree of shelter when waiting for jealous witch boy
Contestants: witch boy and handsome hunter
Hewn wood: hoop of cedar and yucca fiber- Green tree: tree of shelter when abandoned by absconded witch boy
Contestants: Coyote and the Spiders
Hewn wood: stirring stick- Green tree: Peach Orchard
Contestants: hunter and antelope
Hewn wood: Spider’s bow and arrow- Green tree: pinyon tree
Contestants: hunter and Toothed Vagina Woman
Hewn wood: yucca headband (instrument of portage)
- Green tree: none
Contestants: returning hunter and the Zuñi community
Hewn wood: venison pole of cedar and yucca (instrument of portage)- Green tree: none
Contestants: returned hunter and witch boy
Hewn wood: Echo Man’s baton- Green tree: none
Contestants: witch boy (as Echo Man) and the Zuñi community
Hewn wood: prayersticks (willow and yucca)
Lest anyone suppose that in the New World the Two Trees are a pattern only in North American native fable, it should be witnessed elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere too. The Zinacantecos in the Mexican province of Chiapas are claimed by some to be the modern continuators of many traits persistent in Mayan Indian culture since pre-Columbian times. One of their oral fables collected by Robert M. Laughlin in the 1960s provides an obvious Central American multiform of our arboreal pattern. The Zinacantecos’ English-speaking ethnographer Evon Vogt has described the story in these words: 158
This tale describes the events that led to the construction of the Catholic chapel in the hamlet of Salinas (?Ats'am), commonly called “Salinitas” in this myth. The three sisters that have now become important saints in Zinacantan Center, Ixtapa and Salinas each had to have their “homes” built. The eldest sister is the Virgen del Rosario in the church of San Lorenzo in Zinacantan Center; the middle sister is the Virgin in Ixtapa (a municipio that borders Zinacantan on the west). This left the youngest sister without a house until she persuaded the young Zinacanteco who was out working his small field to assemble his relatives and build a small “cow house” (an old type of Zinacanteco house) for her across the river from the present chapel in Salinas. It seems the ground was soggy on this side of the river and there were floods. So the people built a better house for her on dry ground across the river and installed the hollowed-out log on top of the salt well behind the chapel. The myth weaves together the three settlements involved in the salt industry that has been important for the Zinacantecos since before the Conquest.
The Holy Mother of Salinas meets a lone young man in an uninhabited place and suggests that she would like to settle in that district. She asks him to meet her again in fifteen days to tell her whether he and the other men of his hamlet will donate their labour to build her a house there. He agrees to the proposed meeting, bat asks where exactly he should expect to find her when they rendezvous. She tells him that she will be the preternatural at a green tree which bears herbaceous food and will make a gift to men of a hitherto unexploited bounty:
“I’m coming here to sit beneath the avocado [tree],
Here, beneath the avocado,
There I’ll come to sit,
Ah, but you understand,
If they want,
I will bring something.”
Her gift is the merchantable salt of the salt-well now at Salinas. However, once the men of the hamlet have received this donation the rule of gratuity and the green tree are to cease. They are to exact a recompense for their salt in their civilized commerce with other people. Hewn wood and its generic meaning of compensation are accordingly invoked in the preternatural’s next words to her human messenger:
“I want them to make the hollowed-out log for our salt,
Our salt will be born,
You will prepare our salt, you understand,
You will look for your money,
You look for your half reales.”
The preternatural lady of the green avocado tree explains that she is being separated from the society of her sisters, but that her severance from them can be the occasion of a new unity centered on her chapel at Salinas. All that is needed is a spirit of gratuitous hospitality toward her when she next appears under her verdant tree:
“I am the youngest sister,
My older sister is the one in Hteklum,
My younger sister is in Ixtapa,” she said.
“My older sister is content now,
She is living there now,
She has her house now,
Her house is already built,
But the men there accepted her command,
...
Now I would like,
I want my house too,
If you will be so very kind,
If you will build my house.”
Like all her kind, this denizen of green wood also seems capable of unlooked-for largesse at one moment and a lethal threat at the next. She is an absolute mistress of concealments and revelations, mazing the minds of mortals. When she has finished her speech to the man who met her alone in the wilderness, she vanishes from sight:
You see, that’s just the way he was spoken to,
Just like that;
The boy didn’t see where the woman went;
“Ah, was it a real person,
Was it a person who told me she wanted a house,
Couldn’t it have been some dirty business,
Something casting sickness on me,
If I were to die of this,” said the man.
“Ah, I guess I’ll go chat first with my mother and my father,
See what they tell me,
If it’s a caster of sickness [a witch],
If they tell me it’s something bad,
Then certainly it’s terrible,
It isn’t good at all,” said the awful boy [sic].
Time and again the Zinacanteco conteur iterated the antiphony of green wood and hewn. When the preternatural lady returned to keep her appointment with the people of Salinas,
Then she landed under the avocado, leaning against it;
Our Holy Mother jumped out
When her house was flooded, it seems,
Now there is made one hollow log now;
Long ago the hollow log.
The hewn log is the occasion of civilized communal life in Zinacantan just as elsewhere, and music is contingent on it no less than for King Orfeo or for the mythic Jicarilla Apache inventor of gardening. Here too, then, music is played for the lady of the green tree:
They made a new hollow log here on this side,
For there they took out the salt water,
It is soggy on the other side of the river,
So it passed over here to this side of the river,
So now there is a hollow log there till now;
They hold a fiesta,
There is the Fiesta of the Rosary,
The musicians enter, descend, whatever they do,
Again and again;
There is a fiesta,
For that is what our Holy Mother wants.