This paper places the text of a Kashaya traditional narrative in cultural context and analyzes linguistic, poetic, and rhetorical features that contribute to its artistry. In part, this necessitates a reconstruction of the culture that gave rise to the narrative itself, in the tradition of much Native American anthropology, as both the language of the narrative and the gambling game it describes are no longer an active part of the Kashaya culture today. In the interim, the narrator of the gambling myth opened the door to linguists and anthropologists more than three decades ago to preserve as much traditional information as possible for future generations. Brief fragments of the narrator's formal and conversational speech are included as a narrow window onto the culture at that time to illustrate the prevailing conditions that facilitated preservation of the text. The gambling game depicts a traditional gambling game between coast creatures and forest creatures. Background information is provided on the game. The differences between the traditional context of telling coyote stories and the performance that is represented by the text are described. Finally, the poetic and rhetorical structure of the text in terms of grammatical and thematic parallelism, forms of reference, morphological marking, and other narrative devices are examined. Contains 39 references. (Author/JL)