But Coyote, watching from a secret place while the medicine men spoke their spells and chanted their chants, grinned to himself. He added his own quiet, sly spell to those set on the lodge of Power and hid to see what would come next.

It was not long before a human man died. The medicine men played their flutes of bone, luring and tempting, and the dead man’s spirit whirled on the wind, drawn towards the lodge by their magic. In another moment it would enter, and return a living man.

But Coyote was swifter than spirit, swifter than wind! He leaped out from hiding in a blur of gray fur and slammed the lodge’s door shut.

“No!” the people of power cried.

But it was too late. The spirit whined and whirled about the lodge. But the door was too firmly closed. The spirit could not enter, and the power of the bone flutes was broken. The spirit whirled away on its proper path away from the land of the living, and Coyote laughed.

“Thanks to me, the power of your lodge is gone!” he called to the people. “When the first spirit failed to enter, that lodge became nothing more than a useless grass hut!”

That was all Coyote had time to say. In the next moment, all the furious people of power were chasing him.

Of course he escaped, the sly gray one. But from that day to this, all coyotes still run with their heads looking over their shoulders, just in case the people of power—who refuse to admit how Coyote’s trick saved the world—might be catching up to them.