The fleetness of large herbivores is part of their natural defenseĪgainst predators Coyote (or the Native Americans who slaughtered buffalo in this way) takes advantage of that instinctual defense by directing the beasts into the sun and toward a cliff, so that fleetness itself backfires. In a Crow story from the Western Plains, Coyote traps two buffalo by stampeding them into the sun so they cannot see where they are going, then leading them over a cliff. The worm just sits there the fish catches himself.
Even with a baited hook, the victim's hunger is the moving part. Upstream to spawn sexual appetite or instinct gives them a particular trajectory and Coyote works with it. In this fragment of a Nez Perce story from northeastern Idaho, Coyote's salmon weir takes advantage of forces the salmon themselves provide. Trickster commonly relies on his prey to help him spring the traps he makes. "I will find a nice place in the shade and broil this up," thought Coyote. The chute of the trap and then flopped himself out on the bank where Coyote clubbed him to death. "Come into this trap." Soon a big salmon came along and swam into He built a trap of poplar poles and willow branches and set it in the water. No trickster has ever been credited with inventing a potato peeler, a gas meter, a catechism, or a tuning fork, but trickster invents the fish trap.Ĭoyote was going along by a big river when he got very hungry. "Trick" is dolos in Homeric Greek, and the oldest known use of the term refers to a quite specific trick: baiting a hook to catch a fish.Įast and west, north and south, this is the oldest trick in the book.
History of trickery in Greece goes back to similar origins.
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On the North Pacific coast, the trickster Raven made the first fishhook he taught the spider how to make her web and human beings how to make nets. Humans how to catch salmon, he makes the first fish weir out of logs and branches. In Native American creation stories, when Coyote teaches Moreover, the device in question is a central trickster invention. It makes a nice emblem of trickster's ambiguous talents, Loki imagining that first fishnet and then getting caught in it. But the gods find the ashes of his net and from their pattern deduce the shape of the device they need to make. Loki throws the net into the fire, changes into a salmon, and swims away. Sitting by the fire one morning, trying to imagine how the others might possibly capture him, he takes linen string and twists it into a mesh in the way that fishnets have been made ever since. To amuse himself by day, he changes into a salmon, swimming the mountain streams, In the mountains, he builds himself a house with doors on all sides so he can watch the four horizons. Gods so angry that he has to flee and go into hiding. At one point in the old Norse tales, the mischief-maker Loki has made the other Trickster stories, even when they clearly have much more complicated cultural meanings, preserve a set of images from the days when what mattered above all else was hunting. We must begin at the beginning, with trickster learning how to keep his stomach full. And Hermes, in an old story we shall soon consider, invented lying when he wasĪ hungry child with a hankering for meat.īut I'm making a straight line out of a narrative that twists and turns, and I'm getting ahead of myself. Self-portrait, for Odysseus, too, is a master of the art of lying, an art he got from his grandfather, Autolycus, who got it in turn from his father, Hermes. Odysseus walks among us to this day, and he would seem to be Homer's own Homer first "taught the rest of us the art of framing lies the right way." Homer makes lies seem so real that they enter the world and walk among us.
Trickster starts out hungry, but before long he is master of the kind of creative deception that, according to a long tradition, is a prerequisite of art. It begins with a being whose main concern is getting fed and it ends with the same being grown mentally swift, adept at creating and unmasking deceit, proficient at hiding his tracks andĪt seeing through the devices used by others to hide theirs. The trickster myth derives creative intelligence from appetite.
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