Coyote is the great transformer and culture-hero of the Lower and Middle Columbia. Journeying upriver through the myth-age world, he frees the water held back by monsters and hoarders, sends the salmon into the Columbia, and fixes the fishing sites at the Cascades and the Long Narrows. He slays the devouring beings that would prey on the human people about to arrive, and in the same motion ordains the customs by which those people will live and die. He is also an unruly glutton and dupe whose appetites repeatedly land him in trouble, and Chinookan narrators hold both aspects together without contradiction: the ordering of the world is accomplished by a figure who is at once wise maker and foolish rogue. His deeds are inscribed on the landscape itself, so that named rocks, falls, and rapids along the river are remembered as things Coyote made or things he transformed.