Zuñi Folk Tales

by Frank Hamilton Cushing

The Turtle considered it best to die, as it were; but he listened intently to what was going on. The Coyote cut up the deer and made a package of him in his own skin. Then he washed the stomach in a neighboring brook and filled it with choppings of the liver and kidneys, and fat stripped from the intestines, and clots of blood, dashing in a few sprigs of herbs here and there. Then, according to the custom of hunters in all times, he dug an oven in the ground and buried the stomach, in order to make a baked blood-pudding of it while he was summoning his family and friends to help him take the meat home.

The Turtle clawed a little of the sand away from his neck and peered out just a trifle. He heard the Coyote grunting as he tried to lift the meat in order to hang it on a branch of a neighboring pine tree. He was just exclaiming: “What a lucky fellow I am to come on that lame, helpless old wretch and get all this meat from him without the trouble of hunting for it, to be sure! Ah, my dear children, my fine old wife, what a feast we will have this day!”—for you know the Coyote had a large family over the way,—he was just exclaiming this, I say, when the Turtle cried out, faintly: “Natipa!”

“You hard-coated old scoundrel! You ugly, crooked-legged beast! You stingy-box!” snarled the Coyote. “So you are alive, are you?” Dropping the meat, he leaped back to where the Turtle was lying, his head hauled in again, and, jamming every crevice full of sand, made it hard and firm. Then, hitting the Turtle a clip with the tip of his nose, he sent him rolling over and over like a flat, round stone down the slope.

“This is fine treatment to receive from the hands of such a sneaking cur as that,” thought the Turtle. “I think I will keep quiet this time and let him do as he pleases. But through my ingenuity I killed the deer, and it may be that through ingenuity I can keep the deer.”

So the Turtle kept perfectly dead, to all appearances, and the Coyote, leaving the meat hanging on a low branch of a tree and building a fire over the oven he had excavated, whisked away with his tail in the air to his house just the other side of the mountain.

When he arrived there he cried out: “Wife, wife! Children, children! Come, quick! Great news! Killed an enormous deer today. I have made a blood-pudding in his stomach and buried it. Let us go and have a feast; then you must help me bring the meat home.”

Those Coyotes were perfectly wild. The cubs, half-grown, with their tails more like sticks than brushes, trembled from the ends of their toe-nails to the tips of their stick-like tails; and they all set off—the old ones ahead, the young ones following single file—as fast as they could toward the place where the blood-pudding was buried.

Now, as soon as the old Turtle was satisfied that the Coyote had left, he dug the sand out of his collar with his tough claws, and, proceeding to the place where the meat hung, first hauled it up, piece by piece, to the very top of the tree; for Turtles have claws, you know, and can climb, especially if the trunk of the tree leans over, as that one did. Having hauled the meat to the very topmost branches of the tree, and tied it there securely, he descended and went over to where the blood-pudding was buried. He raked the embers away from it and pulled it out; then he dragged it off to a neighboring ant-hill where the red fire-ants were congregated in great numbers. Immediately they began to rush out, smelling the cooked meat, and the Turtle, untying the end of the stomach, chucked as many of the ants as he could into it. Then he dragged the pudding back to the fire and replaced it in the oven, taking care that the coals should not get near it.

He had barely climbed the tree again and nestled himself on his bundle of meat, when along came those eager Coyotes. Everything stuck up all over them with anxiety for the feast—their hair, the tips of their ears, and the points of their tails; and as they neared the place and smelt the blood and the cooked meat, they began to sing and dance as they came along, and this was what they sang:

“Na-ti tsa, na-ti tsa!