Coyote is the trickster and second great figure of Maidu cosmology, paired throughout the creation cycle with Earth-Initiate. He is at once the creator's companion and his opponent: he calls out to the creator over the first waters and advises him, yet he mars the perfect world, and where Earth-Initiate would have human beings live forever, Coyote argues that they must die and stay dead. In this way he brings death into the world, and by a bitter justice his own son is the first to die, bitten by a rattlesnake; though Coyote then repents, the law he has set cannot be undone. Dixon, Kroeber and Shipley all record him as the bringer of mortality and the spoiler of the creator's order, a being connected with both truth and falsehood, humour and grief.