Hyena is the great counter-figure to Hare in Kaguru storytelling: clever enough to scheme yet fatally greedy and short-sighted, it is forever gulled by its own appetite. Beidelman shows that the two animals are deliberately paired, their outwardly similar cunning given opposite moral weight, so that Hyena embodies the destructive, antisocial self-interest that the trickster's wit is made to expose. Beyond the tales, the hyena carries a heavy symbolic load in Kaguru thought, associated with the darkness, filth and inversion of the witch; witches are imagined to consort with and even ride hyenas, and the animal's night-prowling and carrion-eating make it an emblem of the forces that gnaw at ordered social life.