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Nez Perce - Itsayaya Frees the Salmon
After Itsayaya, the coyote, left the chokecherry tree, he traveled for another day until nightfall came. Then he camped beside the river, which no longer rushed along, but seemed like a great still lake. Surely this isn't the lake my cousin told about, thought the coyote. I can see across this one. It can't be the big one.
When morning came Itsayaya took up his bag and walked along, curious about the still, clear water beside him. Then he came to a place called Celilo, where all the animals gathered to catch salmon. Their drying racks stood along the banks, but no one was around. Then he saw the reason.
Right above the falls of Celilo was a huge rock dam all the way across the river. The dam kept the salmon from going on upstream into the mountains and valleys There swimming in the water below the dam, were hundreds and hundreds of salmon which had been trapped on their way upstream.
Itsayaya sat down on the bank and thought for a very long time. "Now whoever made this dam must be keeping the other animals from. fishing here, for no one is around," he said to himself. "If the salmon can't get up the river, then many of the animals in my mountains and valleys will starve. I'll have to use my strongest medicine to get rid of that dam."
Now as Itsayaya sat thinking of how he could break the dam and let the salmon free, he saw a family of swallows flying busily back and forth overhead. Each time they flew by they carried bits of mud and small stones and added these to the top of the dam, making it higher and higher. So, thought Itsayaya, they are the villains!
Itsayaya, the coyote, had heard stories in the land of Simmikum about these fierce swallows, and how they killed anyone who got in their way by pecking them with their sharp beaks. Itsayaya knew that it would take his strongest medicine to destroy the salmon dam while the swallows guarded it.
Then he thought of a scheme. He waved his paws and said his strongestmedicine words. Slowly, slowly, Itsayaya, the little gray-brown coyote, disappeared and in his place came a very tiny coyote puppy, a baby coyote. The baby coyote got onto a log that was floating at the edge of the great river and paddled out into the middle of the stream. Then he floated down near the dam. The swallows, flying overhead, saw him and swooped low to get a closer look.
"See, a baby coyote. He must be lost," said the oldest swallow. Just as the swallows came near, the baby coyote, who was really cunning old Itsayaya, began to cry and wail in a pitiful voice, "A-i- i-i-i, a-i-i-i-i! I am lost. I do not know where my mother and father have gone. They left me in the river when they went to the buffalo country and my log floated away and down here into this strange place. A-i-i-i, a-i-i-i!"
"Poor baby coyote," said one of the swallows. "He is probably hungry. Let us take him home and give him some food."
Then Itsayaya wailed some more. "A-i-i-i, a-i-i-i, I'm starving. Please give me something to eat."
One of the swallows swooped down and in her strong beak she picked up the baby coyote and took him to her cave in the riverbank. There the swallows tended him carefully, bringing him dried salmon and all the finest berries they could gather.
So Itsayaya lived with the swallows as their son. They didn't notice it, but each day he grew bigger and stronger, until at last he was as big as Itsayaya, the king of Simini-kum. On that day he waited until all the swallows had left the caves in the riverbank to look for small stones to add to the dam. Then he hurried out to the river and dived in. From the bottom Itsayaya brought up two huge round stones and with them broke holes in the dam. All the while he chanted his magic medicine words and called out to the salmon, "The dam is broken! Come on, Natsoh, swim up the river; up, up the river to the clear waters of the Koos-koos-ki, up the river to the rushing Te-well- ka-koos and on into the little streams in the val-leys of my kingdom." And the salmon heard Itsayaya and came swimming in flashing silver hordes, jumping over each other in their eagerness to get out of their prison and on up the river.
Then Itsayaya, the coyote, hurried away, running swiftly down the river before the swallows should return to see what he had done.
Taken from Tales of the Nimipoo - From the Land of the Nez Perce Indians, Eleanor B. Heady, 1969
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