A few years ago I heard a new trickster story.  Coyote appeared as an old but active man.  He was fat and he acted as if he wanted to learn things.  Coyote acts this way a lot, but he never really learns.  Just when you think he has the idea, he'll do whatever it is he is being taught, incorrectly.

Like when the gods in the beginning are trying to decide between living only for a while and then dying, or living forever.  They throw a stick into the water and pronounce that if it floats they will not die, but if it sinks they will live only for so long.  It floats and everyone is happy.  But then Coyote comes and throws a stone axe into the water while making the same proclamation.  He looks like a fool and incurs the anger of the others, but of course he is correct.  Living only so long and then dying is the only thing that makes sense.  The rest of us directly pursue what is immediately desirable.  He seems sometimes to do that, sometimes to be a fool, or, more correctly, to fool others. But when wisdom is required or when wisdom dictates a difficult unpopular decision, he is the one who somehow stumbles onto what is correct.

In this story I heard recently, Coyote is traveling and comes to roost in this one community where he presents himself as someone with knowledge, someone who knows how to heal and how to bring wealth.  He walks around with his chest out and says, "I am the one that knows everything. I can solve any problem.  I know how to bring riches.  I am the one who is the chief when it comes to knowledge."  Of course, everyone things this is very funny and laughs about it.

But a very big chief in the East hears about this, hears about this man that knows everything.  And he sets out to talk to this man. This chief from the East owns knowledge.  He has several homes that he travels between daily.  In each of these you can see the knowledge that he owns.  It is on shelves everywhere in the form of paper, and in other places in plastic form, and in still others in magnetic form, and then again in electric or lightning form. This chief owns so much knowledge that he hardly has any place left to keep new knowledge. So he builds bigger homes with more space. At some point he was afraid that he would lose some of it, so he had duplicates and then triplicates made of what he owned.  You can't have enough backups of knowledge.

But even though he owned all of this, he wanted to have more.  And his terror was that something would be forgotten, lost, before he could possess it.  It was said by many people that this had happened before.  There was a certain old woman who had known about something, and when she died it was forgotten. When the chief in the East heard these stories he was sad and he trembled with fear.

So he went to Coyote, who was in human form, and he said, "I would like to possess what you know.  I can capture it and put it into a form so that it won't be forgotten, and I can put these replicas where they will live forever, where it will never be forgotten."

Coyote was very pleased by this idea, because although Coyote knew everything, he could remember very little, and the little he remembered he didn't understand, and he didn't know what it meant.

The eastern chief showed him how to capture voices in a box and how to capture images of people with another box.  And Coyote thought that if he could get someone to sing over him he would be able to capture that sing and later be able to perform it.  He had this image of himself as a great singer; he would open his mouth as if to pray or sing and the voice that he had captured would come from the box and the people would think it was his.  "What a great man," they would all say.  "He knows everything."

So he told the eastern chief that he knew some things that were about to be lost, and that there was a man who wanted to learn these things from him.  That this knowledge was very valuable, very special, very sacred and that he could help this eastern chief to possess it, to have that knowledge forever.  He said with some importance that he was about to have a ceremony and that he was going to teach some of this knowledge to this very old man.

"I know this," he said, "and I am going to teach him about it.  You see I am a very great chief; I know everything and people come from everywhere to learn it from me. But I need you, the chief from the East, to give me some valuable things so that this old man that wants to learn can travel here."

The truth was that he was going to have this singer sing over him, as if to teach it to him, Coyote.  But he turned it all around.  And the valuables he would get from the eastern chief would be used to pay the singer.  And while it was taking place the eastern chief would be having people capture the sounds and the images of the ceremony and then Coyote would own it forever.  And people would say what a great man he was, and how powerful he was, that he could remember so much after only one ceremony.

The singer he had chosen was very old.  He couldn't see in the normal way but had other ways of coming to know things.  During the  ceremony Coyote ran all around.  He would sometimes lie or sit down and appear as the patient and he would sometimes act like he was in charge, telling everyone what to do and  bossing them around.  He didn't really pay much attention. He knew he didn't have to because when it was all over it would be there for him.  The ceremony went on, and on the last day the Blessingway prayers were said.  In a way they consecrated what had gone on during the previous days and nights. They were also a necessary precaution: if anything had been done improperly during the chant, they were a protection for those mistakes.  The chanter who saw differently, not with his eyes, said this part a little differently.

A few weeks later Coyote got copies of the recordings.  But they were tapes of mariachis singing various health awareness  commercials for a Spanish radio station in Chicago. There was one about fetal alcohol, another about children and lead, one about diet cholesterol, and so on. So in a way I guess they were healing tapes. It made no difference to Coyote because, being a Navajo coyote, he didn't understand Spanish.

He of course thought that the reason he didn't understand was because of the sacredness of the songs and the fact that they were sung in a special way so as to keep them secret.  For a while he became very popular lip-synching to the mariachis.  People liked the music (especially the songs about safe sex) and they thought he was very funny pretending he was singing like a great medicine man.

The chief in the East was very happy.  He had the knowledge.  He now possessed it, owned it.  And he put those original recordings into a vault, a hidden place, so that they would never be lost.  He never listened to them because he didn't need to.  When you possess something there is no need to use it; it is yours forever.  Besides, if you use them you might wear them out.

And in a few hundred years, after the people have used and disposed of four other worlds, they will open the vault and the chief's heirs will play his possessions and of course they will be blank.  A part of the story is that you can own and know things only for so long and then they are forgotten.  And when the chat is forgotten, the tapes also will not remember.  It will be as if the knowledge never existed.