One woman was bored with her husband, and so she decided to kill him. She tore the thorny caraguata plant out of the ground, sprinkled some of her own blood into the hole, and planted the bush again. After some time, the evil woman tore off the young shoots, reddened from absorbed blood, and crumbled them for her husband to eat. But he ate and became so weak that he couldn’t even work.
Meanwhile, their son saw that his mother had given his father red sprouts of caraguata, and told him about it. The father became angry and decided to take revenge on his wife. He said at home that he was going into the forest for honey, threw off the alpargata, knocked one against the other for luck in order to quickly find honey, and set off.
Soon he came across a caimbe tree, in the hollow of which a cobra lived, and the bees had built their nest there, he killed the cobra and hollowed out the trunk to get to the honey. And then he ripped open the cobra’s belly, took out the baby, crushed it and mixed it with honey. He decided to give this medicine to his wife, and saved pure honey for his son.
I did as I decided. The wife ate, and then her whole body itched:
“You gave me poisoned honey,” she told her husband. - And for this I will bite you to death!
Hearing this, the husband rushed to run, and his wife followed him and kept shouting that she would eat him. The husband remembered the tree with the parrots’ nest, in which there were three chicks, and rushed to it. He quickly climbed the tree, grabbed the smallest chick and threw it to his wife. The woman ate the bird right on the run. Then she returned to the tree where her husband was sitting and tried to get to the enemy. He threw another chick to her, she ate it too, and she kept trying to climb the tree. The husband threw her the third chick and, while she was finishing with it, managed to get down from the tree and run away.
As soon as the woman noticed that her husband was not in the tree, she immediately set off in pursuit. And her husband ran straight to the trap to hunt animals. In one leap he jumped over the pit, but his wife could not jump over, fell into the pit, hurt herself and died.
The husband covered his wife's body with earth, but visited this place more than once afterwards. After a while, a small bush grew there. The man pulled out the sprouts, but they broke through again. Then he did not pull out the shoots, and soon a large bush with yellow leaves grew over the body of the buried woman. Just then the man noticed that the new plant was not at all similar to those growing around. I picked a few leaves, crushed them and laid them to dry in the sun.
At midnight, when everyone was asleep, he collected dry leaves, put them in a clay pot and lit them. Tobacco smoke filled the air, then other Indians began to sniff where such a pleasant smell was coming from - and they came to the smoker. They came and began to ask where he got these wonderful leaves, and he took it and told them about the bush with yellow leaves. Since then, people have been smoking openly, and everyone is growing a new plant - tobacco.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru