FOLKLORIST TELLS COYOTE TALES _ ONLY IN WINTER

Barre Toelken will tell you a Navajo coyote story in January, but no amount of prodding will get it out of him in June. "They have to be told in the winter or you will screw up the weather pattern," he says.

The traditional tribal moratorium on coyote yarns begins with the first lightning strike in the spring. Then mum's the word until the first killing frost of autumn.

Toelken, 55, has spent years collecting and studying the folklore of the Southwest - tales, folk songs and ballads that echo ever fainter down the decades. To many modern minds, his obsession is, well, puzzling.

"There is still a notion that folklore is baloney. I don't know any other field that has to explain itself any more than we do," Toelken says. "If someone says he is a doctor or a plumber, people say that's fine. But when I say I'm a folklorist, people say, `That must be wonderful for your children, but what do you do for a living?' "

Toelken "does" folklore as a professor at Utah State University in Logan. Although his doctoral degree is in medieval literature, he became enthralled with Native American culture in 1954 when he and a group of friends left college to mine uranium on the Navajo Indian reservation in southeastern Utah.

"We started out driving down there on weekends and got more interested in living among the Indians than going to school," he says.

After uranium mining played out, Toelken was invited to stay on the reservation at Montezuma Creek with a Navajo family by the name of Yellowman. It was during that first winter that he learned about coyote stories, which are not all humorous but always carry a moral.

"Instead of lecturing people, the Navajos tell stories about a coyote," he says.

At first Toelken was simply entertained by the tales. But as his studies in folklore progressed, he returned to the reservation and made several tapes of the stories after agreeing never to repeat them during the summer.

Storytelling is an integral part of the study of folklore. For Toelken and others, it reveals elements of society not recorded anywhere else.

"Folklore is about the live part of the culture rather than the dry part you get through the books," he says. "The values and ideas important to a group of people are often too abstract to talk about, and when they are told in stories, they are more vivid in their explanation."

Toelken says Navajos aren't the only ones who use stories to explain themselves. Mormons, for example, tell stories about three Nephite men from the Book of Mormon who have been allowed to roam the earth for ages, never dying.