Coyote, Skunk, and the Prairie Dogs
Coyote, Skunk, and the Prairie Dogs
While I find it rather creative to imagine a skunk and a coyote to conspire together to murder prairie dogs and rabbits, and although I feel I am doing a disservice to hundreds of years of Navaho storytellers, I am going to attempt to creatively edit parts of the story “Coyote, Skunk, and Prairie Dogs” as a written works, and retool it so that it makes more sense as a modern children’s fairy tale. Not that children would be interested in a story about killing and eating prairie dogs, but I am going to attempt to keep the plot, storyline and outcome as similar to the Navaho trickster tale as possible.
Some things that I feel could be improved is the story needs more description of the events for better visualization, and the writer or storyteller needs to be more confident in the “facts” of the story, telling it as truth. I have also chosen to remove the signals for laughter for (think laugh tracks on TV shows and how utterly irritating they are).
Ma’ii, the sly and scrawny coyote, was trotting along like he’s always done. At a place not very far away, where the river widens and the banks are flat, he was walking along.
Then, in an open area, he was walking along in the midst of many prairie dogs. In the past, Ma’ii had been cruel to the prairie dogs, ransacking their communities and sneaking up and eating whole families at night.
While he was walking, the prairie dogs were cursing him; they were all crowding together and yelling at him. He went along farther into their midst, and then he walked along still farther. He got angry at the prairie dogs, and soon he began to feel quite hostile.
After a while it was midday. He wanted a cloud to appear (his reason was that he was starting to hate those prairie dogs); so he thought about rain. Then a cloud appeared; “If it would only rain on me,” he said aloud. And that’s what happened.
“If only it could rain enough so that there could be rain in my footprints.” And that’s what
While I find it rather creative to imagine a skunk and a coyote to conspire together to murder prairie dogs and rabbits, and although I feel I am doing a disservice to hundreds of years of Navaho storytellers, I am going to attempt to creatively edit parts of the story “Coyote, Skunk, and Prairie Dogs” as a written works, and retool it so that it makes more sense as a modern children’s fairy tale. Not that children would be interested in a story about killing and eating prairie dogs, but I am going to attempt to keep the plot, storyline and outcome as similar to the Navaho trickster tale as possible.
Some things that I feel could be improved is the story needs more description of the events for better visualization, and the writer or storyteller needs to be more confident in the “facts” of the story, telling it as truth. I have also chosen to remove the signals for laughter for (think laugh tracks on TV shows and how utterly irritating they are).
Ma’ii, the sly and scrawny coyote, was trotting along like he’s always done. At a place not very far away, where the river widens and the banks are flat, he was walking along.
Then, in an open area, he was walking along in the midst of many prairie dogs. In the past, Ma’ii had been cruel to the prairie dogs, ransacking their communities and sneaking up and eating whole families at night.
While he was walking, the prairie dogs were cursing him; they were all crowding together and yelling at him. He went along farther into their midst, and then he walked along still farther. He got angry at the prairie dogs, and soon he began to feel quite hostile.
After a while it was midday. He wanted a cloud to appear (his reason was that he was starting to hate those prairie dogs); so he thought about rain. Then a cloud appeared; “If it would only rain on me,” he said aloud. And that’s what happened.
“If only it could rain enough so that there could be rain in my footprints.” And that’s what