ABOUT FIFTY YEARS AGO, when I quit school in 1954 (during my sophomore year), I did not know of lifetime of folklore upon which I was embarking. A forestry major at Utah State, in northern Utah, I quit for only a term-or so I thought-to think of other majors, for one thing, and to try my hand (like everyone else) at finding uranium, a new search going on in southern Utah, a place I wanted very much to see. And see it I did: from investigating remote parts of reservation and marrying a Navajo woman, to catching pneumonia and being cured by a medicine man. Oh yesand also finding some uranium, gypsum, copper, and manganese. The Navajo reservation is roughly size of Belgium, and in those days about 50,000 Navajo lived there, plus any number of uranium prospectors. Away from our camp, we might see one or two others a day; when we got down into Montezuma Canyon we saw no one, except occasional sheep herder. Two years later I was out of money, out of a job, out of just about everything except my friendship with Yellowman family in Montezuma Creek-in southeastern Utah, only place in 1956 where reservation reached north of San Juan River. There were no paved roads, and unpaved roads were seldom passable, because of sandstorms. The nearest neighbor was around three miles away and out of sight. Surrounded by cliffs of sandstone, I heard stories every evening during winter, ranging from Coyote's adventures with Yei Tso (a monster who is lured into a sweat lodge where he breaks his own legs, thinking he has discovered a natural treasure), to Coyote's disastrous encounter with beaver (he bets his hide, loses, and has to be buried for a year for his hide to grow back), to story about how Coyote played dead to trick prairie dogs into coming close enough to kill. All of these stories were told by Little Wagon (ca. 80) and by Yellowman (ca. 60), all of them accompanied by smiles and laughter, all of them functioning-so I was toldto illustrate for us all, especially children, what was normal behavior. In other words, what Coyote does is something we should avoid (most of time, for Coyote represents good as well as bad). I eventually returned to school and changed my major to English, but I never forgot figure of old Coyote. I had caught the Navajo bug, and it has been with me ever since, turning me (in more recent years) slowly from Old English, Middle English, and other trivia, to depths of Navajo language, storytelling, and religion, and from kids' stuff to things that make adults nervous and sick. In 1966 I went back with proper equipment and recorded Yellowman. He and his family now lived just off reservation in a house in Blanding, Utah, and although