There’s a saying: “May the bluebird of happiness fly up your nose.” Ever heard of that one? No? Maybe she’s looking for your nose to fly up, so be sure to keep your finger out of it. Okay? But this is a story about Coyote and Bluebird. Not your nose. There even might be some luck in it. We’ll see.
When we were little kids, on full moonlit nights, we used to love to listen to the coyotes singing in the hills too. But we never understood why they were always so mournful. We’d stand in the lower meadow and howl back, but one time a neighbor mistook us for the real thing and took a pot-shot at us. So we quit our Coyote songs.
Did you know coyotes are always sticking their noses into trouble? They're worse than raccoons or foxes. They always get blamed for all kinds of coyote mischief—especially at the All-You-Can-Eat Smorgie-buffet on garbage nights. Coyotes don’t wait around for food or luck to find them. No siree! They sniff it out. ’Cuz coyotes always like to be at the center of things.
Now, if there was a storytelling circle, well then, to be sure, Coyote was smack dab in the middle of things. If there was a secret hideout, you could be sure Coyote would have a baby-blue eye peeled on the action. In fact, he was always in the middle of things, you could be sure he was right smack-dab in the middle of trouble too.
Sometimes there are noble stories of Coyote holding up the sky, or giving the moon its light, or catching on fire from the sun, or making meteors or eclipses. Things like that. Noble stories like he was some kind of god or something, like Zeus or Apollo. But Coyote was his own man, er, dog...
I knew a mad poet once, Lewis MacAdams, who said he personally knew Coyote, and he told me Coyote had holes in his pockets, that's why he was always into mischief, 'coz he was always losing things. Hot on the trail.
Coyote often did mischievous things and meddled on a grand scale. He once fell in love with a shiny bright blue star way up in the middle of the sky, and when he fell off the mountain, trying to reach her, he made a big crater in the earth. He was always messing about with nature. He never could leave well enough alone. Sometimes, in his crazy meddling, he even changed the looks or the manners of entire species.
One time because of Coyote’s meddling, the packrats sprouted tails from their foreheads dangling like wimpy unicorn horns, or wormy worms. Poor things, they kept running up their own tails, tripping and doing back-ass somersaults, confusing the heck out of the bobcats. They were absolute nervous wrecks. So were the puzzled bobcats.
Eventually the packrats' tails fell off like lizard tails and being practical packrats, they picked them up, dusted them off and stuck their tails right back on their rumps where they belonged. The bobcats and raccoons were happier too. That’s why rats and cats don’t like to leave their tails hanging out. Too risky. They say there’s still some tail-less rats left on Rat Island in the middle of Tomales Bay but I’ve never seen them.
Another time, Coyote was moving the moon around which affected the tides and these dinero clams snoozing in Bodega Bay mud found themselves dangling from a bay tree up on the top of a hill instead of in the mud where they properly belonged at low tide.
Afraid to open their 32 blue eyes for fear of falling out of the trees (their eyes are on the edge of the clamshell), they clamped their shells down hard on the branches. And they were scared of heights too. Poor things. They had to wait for the next winter high tide flood to go home. But some didn’t ever get to go home and they wound up as old fossils on top of the hills to startle some grazing cows, and soured their milk.
Oftentimes trees and hills and rocks are located in odd places because of some foolish thing Coyote did, or did not do, that changed the flavor of the world forever. There’s a place out near Olema (that means the place of strange rocks) where Coyote got to moving some rocks around. Rocks sticking up every which way like lurching giants.
You'd think Coyote was assembling an army of rocks. But he wasn't a very bright field marshall. The rocks wouldn't toe in line like good soldiers. Someone said he assembled that rock army because he saw great white ghost ships rising from the belly of the sea near Fort Ross. And he was right to be afraid of what was to come.
Coyote was so important an animal you’d think he’d already know how to behave, or could at least learn how to learn how to behave properly. He often set bad examples, and he rarely did anything nice, except for by accident. They say the reason when people are bad, and they steal, it’s because of some mischief Coyote did during the time when the world was still forming. And it irrevocably changed the way things were.
One day Coyote saw Bluebird down by the lake, and he was thinking of eating Bluebird for his dinner. She looked yummy but she was so small. But she was also so beautiful he decided then and there that he wanted to be blue as Bluebird, the most beautiful bird in the sky. And so he asked her why she was so blue, and he asked her if he could be blue too.
Bluebird thought about it, and keeping a safe distance between them, she said, “Coyotes aren’t supposed to be blue. Coyotes are supposed to be green as the grass. And that’s just the way it is.” I know you all think coyotes are brown as the summer grass but that part of the story comes later.
But Coyote just couldn’t get that blue out of his head. With his stomach growling with hunger, he’d sneak up on Bluebird to admire her as she was bathing in the stilly lake at dawn. He'd feast his eyes upon her blue visage, and drool and slurp and cry coyote tears into the lake.
It was a special lake, Tolay Lake, nestled in a crack on Sonoma Mountain where a small winter stream sometimes ran in but it never ran out again unless there was a really big earthquake and the fault opened and swallowed everybody up.
That really happened once to a cow in Bear Valley, the earth opened up like a giant tropical clam and she fell right in, until only her tail was sticking out. That's how they know about it. It was sticking up like a skinny fence post with a tassel on top. You can bet your bottom dollar she never stepped on a crack again.
And whenever Bluebird came out of the lake, Coyote asked: “Bluebird, what makes you so blue?” And Bluebird always said, “I wash in the lake every morning and I sing this song: ‘Bluu-hoo-oo, I am as blue as the waters... I am as blue as the skies. I am as blue as your eyes.’”
Coyote liked that song, he thought it sounded like proper Coyote talk like when the moon was full. In fact, somebody overheard it and wrote a hit song, "Blue Moon."
But Coyote was afraid of water, and instead of howling at the moon, he sobbed big blue coyote tears into the lake. He cried so much, the tears turned into tadpoles and wriggled away.
Coyote pestered Bluebird but she ignored him, and pointed to the lake. He tried to be brave, he tried to wade in, he tried to sneak up on the lake and stick a toe in, but it was too cold and he shrieked, ayiii, ayiiii, ayiiii so loud, that a startled buejay took off from his branch so fast, he was buck-naked and clean forgot his feathers. And you know how hard it is to frighten a brassy bluejay. Coyote made a forlorn little fan out of Bluejay’s lost feathers but it only made him sadder.
Coyote even tried jumping off a cliff into the lake. But he knew the water was so cold, he managed to flap his fan a few feet over the water and skate across the surface and it wasn't even frozen over. One day he was walking along and he tripped over one of those big soldier rocks I was telling you about, and he accidentally fell into the stilly little lake with a big splash. Kerplunk!
Though it was cold, Coyote was determined to turn true blue. He scrubbed and he scrubbed and he sang terribly as he scrubbed and rub-a-dub-dubbed, he was so cold his teeth were chattering, but he was still not blue. He was still coyote-colored as the grass.
“How come I’m not b-b-b-bb-blue?” he asked Bluebird. She warbled, “Are you singing the song right?” Coyote sang: “Bluu-hoo-oo-moon, I am as blue-ooo as the waterszzzz... I am as blue as the skieszzzz. I am as blue-ooo as your eye-yi-yi-yiizzzz.’” She chirped, ”Then, you must wash some more. You’re singing it all wrong, Don’t howl so much. Keep your teeth still. By the way, there’s no moon in it.” She muttered, “Crazy coyote can’t even carry a tune in a bucket.”
Coyote bathed two more times and still nothing happened even though he sang the song with no moon in it, and with less howl and with less teeth chatter. Coyote tried again, this time he sang with much less howl and much less chatter, though it was difficult. “Bluu-hoo-oo, I am as blue as the waters...I am as blue as the skies. I am as blue as your eyes."
Well, eventually he got the song right and he turned bright blue and he was so proud of himself. “At last I’m blue.” he said, “I’m azure as the skies. That's for sure.”
“A good thing too, because your singing is so terrible, you cracked a hole in the sky, and now it's leaking,” said Bluebird.
Coyote was so proud of his new blue coat, he was positively insufferable. He said,” See how beautiful I am!” He said it to everyone he met: he said it to the rabbit, and to the deer and to the badger—who didn't give a fig because he was always bad-tempered.
Coyote was so busy looking at himself he soon discovered his shadow was blue too. He fell absolutely head over heels in love with his own shadow, he followed it everywhere and one day while he was following it, he bumped into a big soldier rock. Coyote fell down in the dirt, and he lost all his blue.
He was a real dirt-ball, he was so sad, he sobbed so hard, his tears nearly drowned the lizard who got blue streaks under his chin and down his sides. So did the skink who was running away as fast as he could to keep from drowning.
(When we were kids, we used to turn lizards on their backs and hypnotize them by stroking their blue throats but the blue racing skinks couldn’t be tamed. They’d sooner leave their tails behind than get lulled to sleep, or death.)
Coyote asked Bluebird what should he do to get his blue back. “Just jump back in the lake and sing the blue song,” said Bluebird. “NO way,” said Coyote, “I don’t want to be wet or cold ever again,” ‘coz coyotes don’t like the cold. “A good thing too, your singing is terrible,” said Bluebird.
Coyote was so ashamed about looking like a dirt-ball, he whimpered, “it’s all Bluebird’s fault that coyotes are dirt-brown instead of blue.” And that's why coyotes are brown to this very day.
But sometimes you can still see a coyote, or his cousin, the dog, with a blue eye. Some say a bit of the lake stayed in his eye because it was closed when he fell into the dirt. Some say it's because he turned a blind eye to friendship and ate Bluebird all up in one gulp.
But now you can bet that Coyote always watches his feet, with his nose to the ground, he always watches where he’s going. And if you look really carefully at shadows, sometimes you can see some blue. And sometimes when the moon is blue, Coyote sings to it hoping a little luck will come his way. Or maybe it's because he’s sad ‘coz he still misses Bluebird.
© Maureen Hurley
2/4/04; 2/4/09
This piece came as a surprise gift after two simultaneous events collided like rutting rams: I had just finished telling a story, "La Llorona" for Oakland Unified School District's Family Reading Night, and I had a silk art square due the next day for a traveling hanging for a SPIN conference in Santa Fe. Well, the two events converged right in the middle of an improvisational story I'd made up on the spot because we had some extra time left over. Coyote just crawled out of my head begging to be born or hatched or whatever it is Trickster Coyotes do. Kids loved it so much so I wrote it down. My silk square was a coyote against a backdrop of Mt. St. Helena, all in blue, of course.
Bread & Roses Party at Toby & Phil Nagy's, Piedmont, CA. Will Durst, Maureen Hurley & Michael Pritchard, May, 2004?
