The Cool Coyote and Its Lame European Epithets
I’ve written about wolves but have so far given short shrift to their coyote cousins and the trickster god Coyote. The lines between the beasts and god are surprisingly blurred, so first let’s talk about the former.
Coyote the Canid
Coyotes belong, not too surprisingly, to genus canis (aka, canines) which is part of the family Caninae (aka, canids). Their actual species name is Canis latrans, which basically means “barking dog,” a mildly accurate but still pretty lame Latin moniker. That’s probably because the English-speaking Europeans who first ran across coyotes didn’t give them a lot of thought, tagging them as prairie or brush wolves.
Fortunately, the word coyote is much more interesting, being a Spanish borrowing from its Nahuatl name coyōtl. Nahuatl is still a language spoken in parts of central Mexico and was the language of the Aztecs. It strikes me as fitting that this species, which is unique to North America, retains at least some form of a word used by Native Americans.
The Aztecs were apparently huge fans of coyotes, having at least four different gods inspired by the beast: Coyotlinauatl, Nezahualcoyotl, Coyotlinahual, and Huehuecoyotl. The last of these translates to something like “Venerable Old Coyote,” a name that probably relates to the “Old Man Coyote,” a coyote god of the Native Americans who lived well to the north in the area we now often refer to as the Great Plains.
Coyote the Idiom
As with wolves, coyotes have crept into human language and idioms. Writing in the 1940s. Frank Dobie stated, “In modem Mexican folk sayings and other homely expressions, there are many applications of the coyote’s name and nature to human character and activity.”
The range of such expressions demonstrates the mix of feelings we human tend to have about coyotes, from respect and admiration to fear and disdain.
Sometimes coyote refers to thievery and antagonism. Dobie points to the saying, “Whoever has chickens must watch ‘for coyotes.” It not only referred to a keeper of chickens but to parents of attractive young women. Another saying is, “That coyote won’t get another chicken from me,” suggesting that someone has learned from experience.
Sometimes the term refers to someone sneaking in the shadows and carrying out illegal activities, as is the case with those who smuggle people over the Mexican-United State border. In other cases of Mexican speech, according to Dobie, coyote could refer to a “pettifogger, a thief, any kind of shyster or go-between, a curbstone broker, a fixer who has ‘pull’…”
On the other hand, coyote sometimes has positive or neutral connotations. Dobie writes:
To have “coyote sense” is to have a sense of direction that guides one independently of all landmarks, stars, winds and other externally sensible aids… More than any other animal, the vaquero people say, the coyote is muy de campo. Campo includes everything country – wilderness, desert, prairie,· brush, cactus, mountain, fields. An hombre de campo is frontiersman, woodsman, plainsman, mountaineer, scout, trailer, one who can read all the signs of nature… All of his senses are sharp, all his instincts alive. The true hombre de campo is muy coyote for, beyond all other creatures, the coyote himself is de campo.
Sometimes coyote just means shrewd without the negative connotations of crookedness. Even in English, to “out-coyote” someone tends to mean to out-smart someone who was trying to trick you. It can also be applied neutrally to refer to native plants. This is the case with coyote melon, coyote prickly pear, tabaco del coyote, and coyotillo.
All of these uses shed light on how people view coyotes. So how and why did coyote of the canid become Coyote the god? We’ll come to that, but next up I want to discuss coyote the pest.
Note: Image from Christopher Bruno - http://www.sxc.huhttp://www.sxc.hu/br..., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
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