They say that in ancient times there lived a man who suffered from forest animals destroying his crops.
One day, complaining loudly, he said that if he were a jaguar, he could put an end to all this beast.
The jaguar heard him and offered his help. He led him to his cave, where he kept many jaguar skins, and offered to choose one according to his height.
The man put on one of the skins and, turning into a jaguar, went into the forest to look for animals.
His first encounter was with armadillos, but he saw them as if they were a crowd of people with large sticks, which scared him very much and he had to run away. The same thing happened to the tepescuintle, whom he saw as a huge crowd of old people, surrounding him with shouts; also the deer seemed to him to be Bachakhons, armed with spears. Likewise, his encounter with the peccaries frightened him and put him to flight, for he saw them as a ferocious people, clanking with machetes, with which they cut through the thickets in their path.
After this, the jaguar man returned to meet the jaguar and tell him about his adventures and his inability to hunt animals. Then the jaguar explained to him how to deal with forest animals in order to overtake them; he then went hunting and, in the presence of a man, killed an armadillo, a tepescuintle, a deer, and a peccary. And thus the jaguar taught him what life in the forest was.
After this, the jaguar invited him into the cave to taste all the animals he had killed. They spent eight days eating raw meat, but the man nearly died from indigestion. True, he survived and recovered.
After this, the jaguar decided to stop the tests and asked the man for his skin, as he saw that he could not live like a jaguar.
The saddened man gave the skin, left the cave and returned to his people to tell how he turned into a jaguar and met the forest animal.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru