Contents
The animal people are carefully arranging the stars into beautiful, meaningful patterns — and then Coyote, impatient and bored, grabs the blanket and throws them all at the sky at once, which is why the stars are scattered and random.
- When
- Before human memory — the time of the animal people, when the world was being arranged
- Where
- The great plains under the unfinished sky
The First People are arranging the stars.
They have been at this for a long time, working carefully, spreading a great elk-hide blanket on the earth and sorting the points of light into piles by brightness and color. They are planning constellations — patterns that will mean something, that will tell stories to those who look up. Bear there, in the north. The hunter there, in the west. A river of light running from horizon to horizon in a shape that can be followed.
Coyote watches.
He has been watching for hours, which is about as long as Coyote can watch anything before his patience runs out. He says: let me help. The First People know better than to let him help. They say: no, we are almost done, we have a plan. Coyote says he has a plan too. They don’t ask what it is.
He waits until they are distracted.
When the First People turn to consult with each other about where to put the last cluster — there is a debate about the best position — Coyote picks up the blanket.
He picks up the whole blanket, all the unsorted stars still on it, and he swings it up and opens it against the sky in one great motion, the way you shake out a blanket when you’re airing it, the way you fling it wide so the corners snap. Every star on the blanket goes flying. They scatter in every direction. They land wherever they land, random, unclustered, the opposite of arranged.
The Milky Way is what happens when you throw the middle of the blanket — all those small stars too close together to separate, flying off in a stream.
The First People turn around.
The sky is full of stars. Many of them are in the planned positions — the ones already placed before Coyote acted — and many of them are not. There are clusters that make no shape. There are lone stars in empty patches. There are the ones that fell exactly right, by accident, and make better patterns than anything that was planned.
The First People look at Coyote. He says: I thought that would be faster.
He is not sorry. He is a little pleased with himself. The scattered stars are beautiful in a different way than the arranged ones — there’s more of them, and they fill the whole sky, and on a dark night the sheer number of them takes your breath away.
The animal people look up at the sky Coyote made and find their own patterns in it. They trace animals and rivers and hunting grounds and winter roads in the scatter of light. They make the meaning that the arrangement didn’t make, which is harder and therefore more theirs.
This is what Coyote intended all along.
It is possible he planned it.
It is equally possible he did not plan it, but he always says he did.
Echoes Across Traditions
Entities
- Coyote
- the animal people
- the First People
Sources
- Barry Lopez, *Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with His Daughter* (Andrews McMeel, 1977)
- Jarold Ramsey, *Coyote Was Going There* (University of Washington Press, 1977)
- Keith Basso, *Wisdom Sits in Places* (University of New Mexico Press, 1996)
