“Here I am at your service, to see what I can do for you,” he said to them.

“Oh, no!” they said.  “We invited you because we like you, not because we want anything of you.  Sit down and eat.”

He sat down to the table, which was loaded with all the good things rich people eat.  He put a roll of bread on his plate, and then began to make stripes with it on his arms and legs.

“Why do you do that?” they asked him.  “We invited you to eat what we eat.”

Chulavete replied:  “You do not wish that my heart may eat, but my dress.  Look here!  Last night it was I who was outside of your door.  The man who came to see me burned me with his pine torch, and said to me, ‘You Indian pig, what do you want here?’ "

“Was that you?” they asked.

“Yes, gentlemen, it was I who came then.  As you did not give me anything yesterday, I see that you do not want to give the food to me, but to my clothes.  Therefore, I had better give it to them.”  He took the chocolate and the coffee and poured it over himself as if it were water, and he broke the bread into pieces and rubbed it all over his dress.  The sweetened rice, and boiled hen with rice, sweet atole, minced meat with chile, rice pudding, and beef soup, all this he poured over himself.  The rich people were frightened and said that they had not recognised him.

“You burned me yesterday because I was an Indian,” he said.  “God put me in the world as an Indian.  But you do not care for the Indians, because they are naked and ugly.”  He took the rest of the food, and smeared it over his saddle and his horse, and went away.

The Coras say they originated in the east, and were big people with broad and handsome faces and long hair.  They then spoke another language, and there were no “neighbours.”  According to another tradition, the men came from the east and the women from the west.

In the beginning the earth was fiat and full of water, and therefore the corn rotted.  The ancient people had to think and work and fast much to get the world in shape.  The birds came together to see what they could do to bring about order in the world, so that it would be possible to plant corn.  First they asked the red-headed vulture, the principal of all the birds, to set things right, but he said he could not.  They sent for all the birds in the world, one after another, to induce them to perform the deed, but none would undertake it.  At last came the bat, very old and much wrinkled.  His hair and his beard were white with age, and there was plenty of dirt on his face, as he never bathes.  He was supporting himself with a stick, because he was so old he could hardly walk.  He also said that he was not equal to the task, but at last he agreed to try what he could do.  That same night he darted violently through the air, cutting outlets for the waters; but he made the valleys so deep that it was impossible to walk about, and the principal men reproached him for this.  “Then I will put everything back as it was before,” he said.