Coyote and the Monster
A monster on the Camas Prairie has inhaled every animal in the country, so Coyote ties himself to the mountains, lets himself be swallowed, and cuts the heart out from inside with stone knives while the others run for the mouth. He butchers the carcass and flings the parts across the land, and where each one lands a people comes into being; only when Fox points out that the country at the center has been left empty does he wring the blood from his hands there to make the Nimíipuu. Nez Perce oral tradition, written down in Nez Perce in the 1920s by Archie Phinney, himself Nez Perce, from his mother's telling and published as Nez Percé Texts in 1934.
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