In the beginning there was no night - there was only day. The night dozed in the depths of the waters and did not rise to the ground. People, animals and plants did not differ from each other: everything in nature was one. And everything in nature spoke.
They say that the daughter of the Great Serpent married a young man. This young man had three faithful servants. One day he called them and said:
“Go away, because my wife doesn’t want to go to bed with me.”
The servants left, and then he called his wife and asked her to go to bed with him. But the daughter of the Great Serpent answered:
- It's not night yet.
And the young man said to her:
- There is no night; there is only a day.
Then the daughter of the Great Serpent said:
- My father has a night. If you want me to go to bed with you, send your servants for the night. Let them go down the big river to my father's house. When it is as dark above the world as in the depths of the waters, I will go to bed with you.
The young man called his servants, and the daughter of the Great Serpent sent them to her father's house and ordered them to bring from him a coconut shell from the Tucuman palm tree.
The servants got into the boat and set off. Soon they arrived in the domain of the Great Serpent. He gave them a nutshell from a Tucuman palm tree, tightly sealed with resin, and said:
- Here's a nut for you: you can take it. But be careful: don't tear it off. If you open it, everything in nature will disappear.
The servants took the nut, got into the boat and sailed down the river again. They swam and everyone listened to some quiet voices calling to each other inside the nut: ten-ten-ten... shi-i... These were the voices of crickets and small toads that sing at night.
When they had sailed far away, the most curious of the servants said to the others:
- Let's see what this has in common inside the nut.
The elder said:
– It’s impossible: if we open the nut, then everything in nature will disappear. Let's sail further. Row, row!
They swam further and all listened to the quiet voices calling to each other in the shell of the Tucuman nut, and did not know what kind of voices they were. When they had already sailed very far, they gathered together in the middle of the boat and lit a fire from the burning brand that they were carrying with them. And they melted the resin with which the nut was sealed and opened it. And suddenly everything around them went dark. Then the elder said:
- We're lost. The daughter of the Great Serpent in her house probably already found out that we had discovered the tucuman nut!
And they swam on.
And the daughter of the Great Serpent, there, far away, in her house, said to her husband:
“They let it out at night—we’ll wait for the morning.”
And then everything that was scattered throughout the forest turned into animals and birds. And everything that was scattered along the river turned into wild ducks and fish. A basket of willow branches turned into a jaguar. The fisherman and his boat turned into a wild duck: from the fisherman's head the head and beak of a wild duck were formed; from the boat - the body of a wild duck; from the oars - the paws of a wild duck.
And the daughter of the Great Serpent, seeing the star of dawn, said to her husband:
- Dawn is coming. We must separate day from night.
And then she rolled up the fiber of the stem of some plant and said to him:
- You will be Kuzhubin.
So she made the Kujubin bird from the gokko family. She took white clay and painted the bird's head white; she took the saffron fruit of the uruku bush, which the Indians use to paint the body to protect against illness and the evil eye, and painted the bird's legs dark red. And she said to the bird:
- Kuzhubin, you will sing every time the dawn comes.
She again rolled the fiber of the stem into a ball, and sprinkled the ball with ashes, and said to him:
– You will be a wild hen inambu and you will sing at different times of the night and in the morning.
From then on, all the birds began to sing, each at their own time and even in the morning, so that the day would be more fun to come. When the three servants arrived, the young man said to them:
“You are unfaithful servants: you opened the tucuman nut and let the night go, and everything in nature disappeared, and you too, because you turned into monkeys and now you will live forever on the branches of trees.”
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru