Coyote and the Stars
Trickster Coyote scatters the stars across the night sky, bringing both beauty and chaos.
In the beginning, when the world was still being shaped, the sky above lay dark and empty. The Holy People gathered with sacred care to place the stars. They worked slowly, with deliberation, arranging each point of light to form constellations that would guide the people: hunters and bears, maidens and warriors, all set in order.
But Coyote stood nearby, impatient. His paws itched, his eyes gleamed with mischief. “Why should we take so long?” he demanded. “The sky is vast, and we are slow. Let me help!” The Holy People cautioned him, but he grew restless with their careful pace.
When they paused in their work, Coyote snatched up the sack of stars. With a wild cry he flung them into the heavens. They scattered like sparks from a fire, tumbling in every direction, filling the sky in a sudden burst of brilliance. Some landed neatly, others crooked, some too near, others too far. The patterns of the careful work were lost in a storm of glittering chaos.
The Holy People rebuked him, but the deed was done. “You have brought disorder,” they said. “Some stars will guide, but many will wander. Some paths will be clear, others broken.” Coyote only laughed. “Now the sky is alive! Now it shines in fullness!”
And indeed, though the sacred constellations remained — the Big Dipper, the Pleiades, the hunters and beasts — they were surrounded by a scatter of lesser stars, thrown there by Coyote’s careless paw. The people who looked up at night saw both harmony and chaos, and they remembered the trickster who could not wait.
Yet the tale was not told with anger alone. For though he was reckless, Coyote brought beauty too. Without him the heavens would have been sparse; because of him, they blaze with countless points of light. His mischief, though flawed, gave the world a richness it would not otherwise have had.
So the Navajo told the story: that the ordered stars are the work of the Holy People, while the scattered ones are the mark of Coyote. And whenever people gaze at the Milky Way or lose themselves among innumerable stars, they smile at his folly and say that even chaos can carry a kind of wonder.
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