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."