Trickster Term Analysis

“Watch this,” Jimmy said to me. “She’s going to haul it up in the air, then drop it until it busts open. They do that with clams, too.”

Spotty did no such thing. She waited patiently by the side of the road, preening in the early-morning sunlight and occasionally screeching. Jimmy tried not to look disappointed. I was about to go inside when a car drove by, missing the pocket watch completely. Spotty hopped over and moved it two feet to the left, so that when the next car came along, it ran right over the watch. Jimmy and I looked at each other, then back at Spotty, who picked up the exposed innards of the pocket watch. She gathered some of the pieces and flew away.

In a time distant and vague from the one we know now, she told me, flesh was less rigid. Animals and humans could switch shapes simply by putting on each other’s skins. Animals could talk, and often shared their knowledge with the newcomers that humans were then. When this age ended, flesh solidified. People were people, and animals lost their ability to speak in words. Except for medicine men, who could become animals, and sea otters and seals, who had medicine men too. They loved to play tricks on people. Once, a woman was walking along the shore and she met a handsome man. She fell in love and went walking with him every night. Eventually, they made love and she found out what he really was when she gave birth to an otter.

Weegit the raven has mellowed in his old age. He’s still a confirmed bachelor, but he’s not the womanizer he once was. Playing the stock market—instead of spending his time as a trickster—has paid off and he has a comfortable condo downtown. He plays up the angle about creating the world and humans, conveniently forgetting he did it out of boredom. Yes, he admits, he did steal the sun and the moon, but he insists he did it to bring light to humankind even though he did it so it would be easier for him to find food. After doing some spin control on the crazy pranks of his youth, he’s become respectable. As he sips his low-fat mocha and reads yet another sanitized version of his earlier exploits, only his small, sly smile reveals how much he enjoys pulling the wool over everyone else’s eyes.