Creative Coyotes

Last night, around 10:30 pm, I heard a ruckus on my back porch.  The metal top of the container holding cat food crashed on the floor.  A mother raccoon and three of her babies were enjoying a feast of cat food.  The door to the back porch had been left open, and the four agile raccoons easily entered the porch area. 

Numerous coyotes also wander the vast fields to the west of our home.  Their barking-yipping sometimes fills the night air.  The local dogs then go into a barking fit.  I'm sure the racoons are far up in a tree as needed to avoid being eaten for dinner by coyotes.  

We live in a rural area with almond, olive, walnut, and prune plume orchards;  and pastures for cows, goats, and horses.  We live six miles south of the small city of Red Bluff (14,000 population).  

"According to one Coast Miwok version "Coyote shook his walik" (something similar to a blanket of tule) to the four directions south, east, north and west. The water dried, and land appeared.   In one creation myth called The Diver Coyote creates the earth and land from the Ocean or endless water. Coyote sends a duck to dive for some "earth". The duck dives to the bottom and comes up with some "earth". Coyote takes the earth and mixes it with "Chanit" seeds and water. The mixture swells and "the earth was there.   Another creation story says that there is "no earth, only water". Silver Fox (a female) feels lonely and mentions this in a prayer song, and then meets the Coyote. Silver Fox makes an artistic proposal: "We will sing the world". They create the world together by dancing and singing. As they do so, the earth forms and takes shape   In The Creation of Man myth, Coyote catches a turkey buzzard, raven and crow, plucks their feathers and place the feathers in different parts of the earth. They turn into the Miwok people and their villages.   Coyote comes from the west alone, followed by Chicken Hawk, who is his grandson. Coyote turned "his first people" into animals. He made the Pomo people from mud and the Miwok people out of sticks.  From the Sierra Miwoks, another creation myth is more comparable to Pomo mythology: Coyote and Lizard create the world "and everything in it". Coyote create human beings from some twigs. They argue over whether human beings should have hands. Lizard wants humans to have hands but Coyote does not. Lizard wins a scuffle, and humans are created with hands.   According to Coast Miwok, the dead jumped into the ocean at Point Reyes and followed something like a string leading west beyond the breaker waves, that took them to the setting sun. There they remained with Coyote in an afterworld "ute-yomigo" or "ute-yomi", meaning "dead home.   Many of the ideas, plots and characters in Miwok mythology are shared with neighboring people of Northern California. For example the Coyote-lizard story is like the tale told by their neighbors, the Pomo people. In addition, the Ohlone also believed that Coyote was the grandfather of the Falcon and maker of mankind. The relationship and similarity to Yokuts mythology is also evident.   The myths of creation after an epic flood or ocean, the Earth Diver, and the Coyote as ancestor and trickser compare to Central and Northern California mythemes of Yokuts mythology, Ohlone mythology and Pomo mythology. The myths of "First People" dying out to be replaced with the Miwok people is a "deeply impressed conception" shared by Natives in Northwestern California."
-   Miwok Mythology  

Nature Spirits