“Yes, you did want it for something,” said the Coyote, “and I know what it was, too.”
“Well, what?” asked the Turtle, who was waxing rather angry.
“You wanted it to skin a deer with; that’s what you wanted it for. Where is the deer now, come? You have killed a deer and I know it. Tell, where is it.”
“Well, it lies over yonder,” replied the Turtle.
“Where? Come, let us go; I’ll help you skin it.”
“I can get along very well without you,” replied the Turtle.
“What if I do help you a little? I am very hungry this morning, and would like to lap up the blood.”
“Well, then, come along, torment!” replied the Turtle. So, finding a knife, they proceeded to where the deer was lying.
“Let me hold him for you,” cried the Coyote. Whereupon he jumped over the deer, spread out its hind legs, and placed a paw on each of them, holding the body open; and thus they began to skin the deer. When they had finished this work, the Coyote turned to the Turtle and asked: “How much of him are you going to give me?”
“The usual parts that fall to anyone who comes along when the hunter is skinning a deer,” replied the Turtle.
“What parts?” eagerly asked the Coyote.
“Stomach and liver,” replied the Turtle, briefly.
“I won’t take that,” whined the Coyote. “I want you to give me half of the deer.”
“I’ll do no such thing,” replied the Turtle. “I killed the deer; you only helped to skin him, and you ought to be satisfied with my liberality in giving you the stomach and liver alone. I’ll throw in a little fat, to be sure, and some of the intestines; but I’ll give you no more.”
“Yes, you will, too,” snarled the Coyote, showing his teeth.
“Oh, will I?” replied the Turtle, deliberately, hauling in one or two of his flippers.
“Yes, you will; or I’ll simply murder you, that’s all.”
The Turtle immediately pulled his feet, head, and tail in, and cried: “I tell you, I’ll give you nothing but the stomach and liver and some of the intestines of this deer!”
“Well, then, I will forthwith kill you!” snapped the Coyote, and he made a grab for the Turtle. Kopo! sounded his teeth as they struck on the hard shell of the Turtle; and, bite as he would, the Turtle simply slipped out of his mouth every time he grabbed him. He rolled the Turtle over and over to find a good place for biting, and held him between his paws as if he were a bone, and gnawed at him; but, do his best, kopo, kopo! his teeth kept slipping off the Turtle’s hard shell. At last he exclaimed, rather hotly: “There’s more than one way of killing a beast like you!” So he set the Turtle up on end, and, catching up a quantity of sand, stuffed it into the hole where the Turtle’s head had disappeared and tapped it well down with a stick until he had completely filled the crevice. “There, now,” he exclaimed, with a snicker of delight. “I think I have fixed you now, old Hardshell, and served you right, too, you old stingy-box!”—whereupon he whisked away to the meat.
The Turtle considered it best to die, as it were; but he listened intently to what was going on. The Coyote cut up the deer and made a package of him in his own skin. Then he washed the stomach in a neighboring brook and filled it with choppings of the liver and kidneys, and fat stripped from the intestines, and clots of blood, dashing in a few sprigs of herbs here and there. Then, according to the custom of hunters in all times, he dug an oven in the ground and buried the stomach, in order to make a baked blood-pudding of it while he was summoning his family and friends to help him take the meat home.
The Turtle clawed a little of the sand away from his neck and peered out just a trifle. He heard the Coyote grunting as he tried to lift the meat in order to hang it on a branch of a neighboring pine tree. He was just exclaiming: “What a lucky fellow I am to come on that lame, helpless old wretch and get all this meat from him without the trouble of hunting for it, to be sure! Ah, my dear children, my fine old wife, what a feast we will have this day!”—for you know the Coyote had a large family over the way—he was just exclaiming this, I say, when the Turtle cried out, faintly: “Natipa!”
“You hard-coated old scoundrel! You ugly, crooked-legged beast! You stingy-box!” snarled the Coyote. “So you are alive, are you?” Dropping the meat, he leaped back to where the Turtle was lying, his head hauled in again, and, jamming every crevice full of sand, made it hard and firm. Then, hitting the Turtle a clip with the tip of his nose, he sent him rolling over and over like a flat, round stone down the slope.
“This is fine treatment to receive from the hands of such a sneaking cur as that,” thought the Turtle. “I think I will keep quiet this time and let him do as he pleases. But through my ingenuity I killed the deer, and it may be that through ingenuity I can keep the deer.”
So the Turtle kept perfectly dead, to all appearances, and the Coyote, leaving the meat hanging on a low branch of a tree and building a fire over the oven he had excavated, whisked away with his tail in the air to his house just the other side of the mountain.
When he arrived there he cried out: “Wife, wife! Children, children! Come, quick! Great news! Killed an enormous deer today. I have made a blood-pudding in his stomach and buried it. Let us go and have a feast; then you must help me bring the meat
