The Trickster
story dealt "with a figure clearly envisaged by the eye of the myth-maker, pre-existent to any definite question: the arch-trickster himself, no matter whether he appeared in human form, or as a cunning animal, the prototype of Reynard the Fox, whose equivalent for some tribes was the coyote, for others the raven, but who in all his manifestations was a primordial being of the same order as the gods and heroes of mythology."
"In mythology, we hear the world telling its own story to itself. The supposition that we are up against a phenomenon of a kind which the science of mythology is not meant to ‘explain’, just as the science of aesthetics is not meant to ‘explain’ the phenomena of art, seems to me unavoidable. Rather, its task is to help us understand this phenomenon in human terms."
is this the original inspiration for Wiley and the roadrunner?