Coyote [itsaya' ya] was going along up the valley. There, as he went, someone shouted to him, “You who goes along up the valley, let us engage in battle.”
“Ah, right here they buried a person alive once upon a time. It is he who haunts me,” said Coyote to himself.
But thereupon he heard again, “You who goes up the valley, let us engage in battle.”
“Ho! [ma'!]” Coyote said to himself suddenly. “There they are perched on the mountaintop.” Now he shouted to them, “Hurrah! [iya' - war cry]. That happens to be just what I am searching for; let us, indeed, engage in battle.” They disappeared from the mountain peak. It so happened that they were Hummingbird [tama' mno] and his brother.
Shortly they came dashing into view. Both fought and killed Coyote very easily. “It was Coyote,” one said to the other. “That is why he was so spirited and impudent.” They dragged him down the hill and threw him into the river. He floated downstream one and a half bends of the river. There he floated ashore.
Then Magpie [a ' k' ax] came dashing along up the river about that time crying, “Law, haw, law. Well, here’s my friend! What manner of thing could have killed him? Perhaps he has brow-fat.” He pecked, searching for the brow-fat, when he awakened Coyote by his pecking ["pok' a' t, pok' a' t, pok' a' t"].
“You! Why are you flying about here you-you Magpie? You have awakened me by your pecking just as I was carrying the head of the valley’s daughter across the river,” scolded Coyote.
“And how could you have been carrying the head of the valley’s daughter across the river when above here the Hummingbirds killed you? They are powerful killers,” the Magpie said as he left him.
Coyote now pushed himself to his feet, struck his hips, and out tumbled his children ["yo' x ox ox ox" - - sound of tumbling out]. They fought themselves at once until Coyote told them, “Hurry, come inside.” They ran back into Coyote again, but he cut off the entry of the youngest one and said to him, “Tell me things.”
“You, the one who makes others cold by floating about in the water! Above here are the Hummingbird and his brother, terrible killers, and you, you inveterate finder of trouble, thought, ‘I will fight with them,’ ” he scolded Coyote.
“Yes, now tell me things,” said Coyote.
“There, from where they shouted at you, they have their hearts which they leave behind in safety while they dash off to battle and thus absolutely fortify themselves against death in every way. You will go up the valley, but as you come close by you will make yourself a cane and then affect lameness. When they shout at you again reply to them, “Come beat me, beat me to death right here where I am. Below here we were fighting, and l was wounded like this.’ Then, just as they go out of sight over the other way to go down the ravine, you, too, at exactly the same moment, will exert yourself to your greatest speed straight up the mountainside to dash upon their hearts and thereby kill them.
“Yes so I was thinking already.” said Coyote. “By the way. go back inside now for you are only detaining me.” From there he went on up the valley. Presently he thought, as he went along, “Now very shortly they will shout at me.” Here he made a cane and then went along limping, just barely able to walk.
The Hummingbirds were perched on the mountaintop. They said to each other, “There comes another.” The elder one said, “He is a lame, old man, the poor fellow who goes along. Let us allow him to pass.”
“Yes” replied the younger, “but let me just joke with him, just by way of scaring him perhaps.”
But the elder brother asked him not to do it. “The poor fellow. Leave him unmolested.”
Nevertheless, the younger one shouted to Coyote, “You there who goes up the valley let us engage in battle.” He went along as unmindful as if he hadn’t heard at all.
The elder brother again remonstrated, “Let him be” I
But the other persisted in shouting again, “You who goes up the valley there, let us engage in battle.”
Coyote came to a sudden stop and replied, “Come, beat me to death right here where I am then. Below here we were fighting, and I was wounded.”
Here the younger brother said to the elder, “Now let us attack him. You know we never allow anyone to pass by.” Then out of sight they went. At the same moment Coyote ran, just like a tendon broken from tautness, upward at great speed.
The Hummingbirds swooped down the ravine and arrived very quickly. “Where has gone? He was right here.” They looked about when, suddenly, they saw Coyote. The elder one said, “Now he will kill us!” From there they flew their fastest, followed Coyote who was running up the hill with a speed like the tension of tendons broken from tautness. They chased him furiously, and as they went along, the elder brother berated the younger.
“I told you, ‘Why bother him!’ Now he will kill us.”
Coyote saw, as he ran, the feathers fastened to a willow tree. He saw t Hummingbirds behind him, saw them quickly gain on him. He exerted himself; he exerted himself to the utmost. He arrived, with a dash, on the mountaintop. Quickly he seized the feathers and plucked them. They, too, now had come up very, very close when, sudden they fell backwards — dead.
“Where do you get this notion to become killers?” Coyote spoke. “Only a short time from now the human race is coming. Then the people will say, ‘Already it has come to that time of the year [May], for the Hummingbirds are going about.’ ”
Taken from Tales of the Nez Perce by Donald M. Hines, Ye Galleon Press; Fairfield, Washington, 1999 [gathered from other source books dated between 1912 and 1949]