The estate’s first audio work is not a reading of myth but the sound of myth being told. In 1949, in the founding year of KPFA Berkeley — the world’s first listener-supported radio station — Jaime de Angulo (1887–1950) sat down at the microphone and performed the old time stories of the Pit River country: Coyote tales, animal journeys, and medicine songs sung in his own worn voice. He was dying of cancer, and he knew it. Behind him lay one of the strangest careers in American letters: a Paris-born Johns Hopkins MD who walked away from medicine into the Achumawi world, a self-taught linguist of some seventeen California languages, the man Ezra Pound called the “American Ovid,” the guide who brought Jung to Taos in January 1925. What the estate holds is the complete series as his daughter Gui de Angulo re-edited it for the Pacifica Radio Archives in 1991 — twenty-two parts, roughly twenty-one and a half hours, catalogued as BD0018.01. The radio frame is not packaging; it is part of the work. Tales break off when the studio clock runs out — “Well, my time is almost up. I see the engineer telling me good night” (Part 01, 0:12:45) — and resume on the next broadcast, exactly as a winter-house storyteller stops when the fire burns low. The oldest form of serial narrative found, in its teller’s last year, the newest medium’s first free station.

Beneath the animal comedy runs a single sustained lesson: how to become a person in a world where everything already is one. The spine of the early parts is the westward journey of Bear, Antelope, and their son Fox Boy — the cycle later shaped into Indian Tales, the book by which most readers know de Angulo, assembled from these very broadcasts. Fox Boy suffers the “ha-has,” tantrum-fits of I-don’t-want-to, and the tales correct him not with punishment but with patience: it takes a long time, Antelope tells him, to learn to be a man or a woman. When the family camps in strange country, Bear addresses the dark before sleep: “Good night, ground. Some people are lying right on your face. You must take care of us. We want to live a long time” (Part 01, 0:09:57). The mountains, the pine tree, the grass people, Chief Rattlesnake, even the flint arrowheads singing advice from their buckskin sack — all are neighbors owed courtesy. On the page, in Indian Tales or A Jaime de Angulo Reader, these good-nights read as charm; in the voice they carry the gravity of actual prayer. Readers have the words. Listeners get the manner, which is where the teaching lives.

Coyote arrives not as a literary device but as a relative — the purest trickster in the estate’s holdings because he is heard from inside the kinship. The travelers reach the doorless house of the old man, doctor and world-maker, and Fox Boy demands the real thing, real old time stories: “So you want an old time story, said Coyote old man” (Part 02, 0:10:34). What follows is a creation cycle told as household reminiscence — the world catches fire, the flood follows, the wood rats steal fire back from the south world, the sun itself is stolen and carried home. Later, when a crowd of little men mock Fox Boy for boasting of his illustrious grandfather, the joke turns cosmic: “Coyote Old Man is everybody’s grandfather” (Part 03, 0:05:48). Paul Radin’s The Trickster, shelved nearby, theorizes this figure from the outside as the archaic, undifferentiated psyche; de Angulo simply lets him talk. And the structure doubles the theme. Coyote telling old time stories inside an old time story is precisely the recursive position of the dying ethnographer at the KPFA microphone — a trickster relaying the trickster, every frame of the story claiming the same grandfather.

A depth psychology of soul runs under the plots, and it is the estate’s clearest bridge between these tales and its modern shelves. Before dawn on the trail, Fox Boy hears his father humming and asks why. Antelope explains: your shadow wanders at night, visiting, going places, and it must hear your song to find its way home — for a person whose shadow stays lost sickens and dies. “You can’t keep on living without your shadow” (Part 01, 0:15:51). Eliade’s Shamanism catalogues exactly this — soul-loss and its retrieval by song — from Siberia to the Americas; here the doctrine appears as a mother’s answer to a child at a campfire, which is how living doctrine actually travels. The teller himself is a hinge in that history: it was Jaime who guided Jung to Taos in January 1925, the visit whose conversations worked on Jung’s psychology ever after, and the historical chapters of Cody Peterson’s The Shadow of a Figure of Light run through Jaime for that reason. Notice, too, what the tales refuse. When Fox Boy protests Coyote’s contradictory genealogies — “I’m getting all mixed up. I don’t know which is which, or what is which, or which is what” (Part 05, 0:00:39) — the elders only laugh and tell him he studies too much. Myth holds contradiction the way the ground holds sleepers.

This is the only canon work the estate possesses in its author’s living voice, and that fact is its meaning. Indians in Overalls records the Pit River fieldwork in prose; the Reader gathers the essays and letters; Indian Tales fixes these stories in print. Only here does the thing itself survive: the songs no notation could hold, the animal voices, the timing, the breath of a man spending his last strength on the air of a station that belonged to its listeners. The series is saturated with good-nights — Bear’s to the ground, Jaime’s to the engineer, and, deep in Part 06, old man Coyote’s good night to the people, the redwood trees, the grass, and the night itself before the whole house sleeps (0:23:51). It is impossible now to hear them as anything but rehearsals. Pound’s Ovid ended the Metamorphoses promising to live on in the mouths of the people; the American Ovid arranged it literally, telling the world’s making while his own was unmade. The trickster-shaman, singing his shadow home over the open air: the myth teller become, in the estate’s one recording, the myth.