Napi and the Elk - ponoká

Story as told By Carl Brave Rock

Napi was watching the elk; ponoká. They were playing follow the leader and making patterns and zigzags. Napi was hungry, so he set up a scheme.

He went down to the elk and asked, “Can I play this game with you?”

The elk said, “Sure, you can play Napi.”

Napi started running with him, zig zagging and playing follow the leader. So Napi asked if he could be the leader.  Napi became the leader and elk were following left and right, zig zagging. It just so happened that Napi knew there was a cliff not too far away and there’s a little tongue in the cliff to step on to. So, Napi led all the elk over the cliff. He jumped on the ledge and all of the elk fell over the cliff to their death. Napi was happy then because he had food for the entire season. Napi went down and started butchering the elk and not too far away there was Coyote; ksina’oo. Coyote was watching and Coyote knows Napi likes to play tricks on all of the animals, so he thought well, we’ll play a trick on Napi. Coyote decided to fake having a lame foot.

Coyote went down to Napi and asked if he could have a piece of meat, “I’m hungry”.

Napi said, “Saa (no), this is mine. I am keeping this for the season.”

Coyote then started begging and said, “Please Napi, look, my foot is hurt. Even just give me a piece of burnt meat, that would be alright”.

Napi said, “Saa, saa, saa, this is for me. This is my food”.

So Coyote had to start scheming for himself and he knew that Napi liked competitions; he likes games.

He asked Napi, “How about we have a race? If I win, you give me a piece of meat. If you win, I’ll leave you alone forever.”

Coyote said, “Look at my foot, you could beat me with this foot.”

Napi agreed, he said, “Okay, I could beat you.”

They had a race and were running for a good half of the day and Napi got a good distance on Coyote because Coyote was limping. Then Coyote showed Napi that his foot wasn’t hurt and turned around and ran back toward the meat. Napi was still running as fast as he could.  He then turned around to see coyote running back to the food and that his foot was not hurt.

Napi shouted, “Please just save me some meat coyote.”

Coyote wasn’t going to save him anything. Coyote got back to the elk and he knew that he couldn’t eat all of the elk before Napi got back, so he started hollering to all of the animals, “Come on over, we’re having a feast!”

Along came makóyi, the wolf, along came mai’stóó, the crows, even kaanaisskiinaa, the mice came running. They ate all of Napi’s food. By the time Napi got back to his elk, there was nothing left. Napi came back to nothing.

This taught Napi and good lesson: Don’t be stingy and hoard food. Napi was deceitful by tricking the elk to jump over the cliff and greedy by wanting to keep the food for himself.