The body of each animal is filled with the juice of the food on which it feeds. The milk of a young cow, which nibbles only clover flowers, smells of freshness; for a boar that eats meat, twenty alqueires of cassava are not enough to take away its smell; and even the blood of a sad heron and a cunning ibis smells like fish. The same thing happens to a person, although it does not depend on what he eats: his soul is reflected in his eyes. A man with clear eyes is handsome and generous, but be careful of the one whose eyes are red, be doubly careful of the one whose eyes are yellow, and beware of the one whose eyes are spotty or dull!..
[Alqueire is an ancient measure of bulk solids and liquids, equal to 13.8 l.]
All of the above also applies to the mboyguas, which devoured so many eyes.
All the eyes - and how many, how many there were! - all the eyes that were devoured by a huge snake reflected the light of the ray of the setting sun, which they saw for the last time before eternal night came for them... And these eyes - and how many, how many there were! – with a drop of light they were swallowed by a snake; At first there was a handful of them, then a handful, then a lot, then a whole mountain...
And since the mboyguazu had no skin, like, for example, an ox, no scales, like, for example, a golden mackerel, no feathers, like an ostrich, no shell, like an armadillo, no thick skin, like a tapir, its body was completely, completely transparent and shone with thousands of thousands of lights: these were particles of eyes that retained a drop of light. And it so happened that in the end mboyguazu turned into light, into fire without flame, into a bluish-yellowish, cold and sad ray formed by the eyes that she swallowed while they were still glowing...
Mboyguazu turned into light, and that is why the people, who now saw the snake in a different guise, did not recognize it. People did not recognize it and, thinking that it was another, completely different snake, they began to call it boitata, fire snake boitata.
And often the hungry boitata crawled into the farms. It was then that the forest scout, the teu-teu bird, sang. And people looked with amazement and curiosity at the huge transparent body of the boitata snake, a fiery snake whose length exceeded three lazos and which glowed dimly in the grass... And people began to cry. They cried, lost in the face of danger, and their tears sparkled as brightly or even brighter than their eyes, and Boitata dreamed of devouring the living eyes of people, because dead eyes began to disgust her...
[Laso is a measure of length equal to 15-25 m.]
But, as has already been said, in the darkness only a dim light was visible emanating from the body of Boitata, and it was her approach that she warned the whole earth, shrouded in the darkness of the night, with her song teu-teu.
Time passed - Boitata died, died of weakness, because the eyes that she swallowed filled her womb, but did not nourish her: the light of the eyes that found themselves in the womb when they were still alive cannot provide nourishment...
In rage, the snake swayed in a heap of carrion, over bodies touched by decay, over their mutilated remains, over loose hair, over skeletons scattered here and there, and then its body crumbled into dust, as any earthly creature turns into dust.
And it so happened that the light that was in her was released with her death.
And then what was supposed to happen happened: finally the sun appeared again!
Yes, it appeared, but it did not appear suddenly. First of all, when it appeared, the fog began to dissipate and stars appeared, which then dissolved in the red sky; then it became lighter and lighter, and suddenly somewhere in the distance a strip of bright light appeared... then - a flash of light... and then the sun rose, rose, it reached its zenith and began to decline, as before, and this time it forever divided equally the time of day and time of night.
All the mortal inhabitants of the earth gathered at the origins of their lives to be born again, and only the light emanating from Boitata remained alone and never merged with the reborn light.
The light emanating from the boitata remained gloomy forever, and in those places where there were more falls, it was the dimmest. And in winter, paralyzed by the cold, he does not appear and sleeps, or maybe hides.
But in the spring, when it gets hot, a difficult time comes for him.
Boitata, curled up in a spiral, a ball - boitata, a fiery snake! - begins to roll across the fields, across the plains, over the mountains until night falls!..
This is a yellowish-bluish fire that does not burn dry weeds!.. Does not warm spring water - it twists, wriggles, rushes, jumps, falls, bursts and goes out... and reappears just when you least expect it, and starts all over again!
Cursed! Get lost!
Anyone who sees a boitata may go blind... If you stumble upon it, you have only two means to escape: either stand calmly in place, closing your eyes and holding your breath, until it crawls away; or, if you are riding a horse, unwind the lasso, throw it on it and drag it behind you!
Boitata appears with an iron ring around her neck, but suddenly, rolling around in the weeds, she tears off the ring and crawls, scattering luminous sparks, only to disappear again and crawl somewhere again with the help of a light breeze.
Prudent shepherd! Drive your herd away from those meadows where the boitata nests: abundant pasture can become a disaster for you...
I saw it myself!
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru