They say that in ancient times there lived on the Huanaua River girls who kept the symbols and talismans of Jurupari, the evil spirit of the Tupi tribe. And then one day one of these girls ran away from the village to find a husband.
When it got dark, she found herself in the forest and settled down for the night right under the open sky. And when she woke up at dawn, she burst into tears of fear. But suddenly men's voices were heard.
One said:
“I’m not going to get married, unless I meet a beautiful girl.”
It was then that the men met a girl who had run away from the village, and the one who spoke about marriage found that she was pretty. I must say, she liked him too.
The young hunter asked:
– Do you want to become my wife?
The girl replied:
- Yes, I want to.
And he took her with him.
And he was from a tribe descended from the Jacamin birds.
The old people celebrated the marriage ceremony, and then the young people went to swim in the stream. Jacamine grass grew on its bank and they rubbed themselves with it before plunging into the water.
And then they turned into birds.
After some time, the female Jacamine felt that eggs had been born in her, her belly grew and grew and finally became so large that she could no longer walk.
“It seems to me that I’m not carrying eggs,” the female thought, “that’s right, it’s a child.”
Several months passed, and she gave birth to two children: a boy and a girl.
They grew quickly.
A strong and dexterous boy loved to hunt with a bow and arrow, so his mother warned him one day:
“Son, never kill a Jacamine bird.”
Time passed, and the mother had never seen her children when they were sleeping. But one night she decided to go look at them and was terribly frightened, because she saw seven stars on the girl’s forehead, and a whole snake of stars seemed to be wrapped around the boy’s head.
The father also came to look at the children and was also scared:
- I myself am a bird, why do I have human children?
He went to the page sorcerers and asked them:
- How could it happen that I myself am a bird, and my children are people?
And the sorcerers answered him:
– Don’t doubt it, these are your children. When you lay with your wife, she looked at the sky, which is why the stars were imprinted on their bodies.
While the father was talking with the witches, the mother went for a walk. And the son grabbed a bow and arrows and went hunting.
While wandering through the forest, he saw the Jacamine birds and shot them all. Then the hunter returned home.
When his mother arrived, he immediately told her:
- Mom, I killed all the Jacaminas! Do you want to watch? They went to where the boy was hunting, and the mother saw that he had killed his father and all the sorcerers. She wailed:
- Son, you killed your father and the witches. Who will help us now? How are we going to live?! But the boy objected:
“Don’t be sad, mom, I’ll get everything we need.” After this, the mother and children decided to go to the land of their ancestors. On the way, the mother said to the boy:
- My son, what will I say to my tribe? When I left there, I was a girl, and now I’m returning with children; your grandfather will order me to be locked in a punishment house so that I will never see a man again.
- Calm down, mother. I will put an end to such customs. And they moved on. When they came to the village where his mother’s native tribe lived, the boy grabbed a huge stone, threw it into the punishment house and it collapsed, and all the women who were locked there fled. The stone was so heavy that it all went into the ground and took the ruins of the house with it. Seeing this, the grandfather was afraid of the boy. And all the people of that land began to fear him. And then the grandfather said:
“I have always respected you, but make sure everything is as it was before, restore what was destroyed.” The boy answered his grandfather-leader:
“I, too, would like everything to be in its place.”
He picked up the stone and placed it where it had been before. Since then they have lived well along with their relatives.
But after some time, that woman's daughter fell ill because she still did not have a husband.
Then her brother said to his mother:
- Let me treat my sister. I alone can cure her, because only I know where to look for a cure for her illness.
The mother agreed, and the young man took his sister to heaven, because he did not want her to recover. We now see it in the sky and call it the constellation of the Seven Stars (Pleiades).
After some time, the mother, seeing that the children were not returning for a long time, went in search. As she passed by a stream, she was swallowed by a huge snake. Returning home, the son did not find his mother and, in turn, went to look for her. Everywhere he went, his children remained behind him. Finally he found his mother and took her to heaven too.
It became the constellation we call Pinon, or the Great Serpent.
And all this happened during the time of our ancestors.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru