Once upon a time there lived a woman whose name was Viovio, and she had a son named Ganumi. When he was still an infant, his mother became pregnant again. This caused her milk to spoil and Ganumi stopped suckling. He lay there, hungry and dirty, his mother did not wash him and only sometimes gave him a little sago.
Shortly before giving birth, they curtained a corner of the house for her, and there she gave birth. She did not throw away the mat with blood stains, and one day, when everyone had gone to work in the gardens, she put Ganumi on it and also left. Ganumi immediately jumped to his feet and shouted:
- Oh, what is this red thing here?
And immediately Ganumi turned from a boy into a parrot. His body was covered with feathers, a beak appeared, and it became all red - like blood stains on a mat. The parrot flew to the roof of the hut and then flew to where Viovio was making sago and landed on a nearby sago palm. The woman thought: “I have never seen such a bird, how beautiful it is!” And the bird screamed in the language of red parrots:
- Viovio, do you recognize me?
The woman threw some sago to the bird and said:
- Why is this bird calling my name? The parrot flew to another tree, dropped its feathers,
became a boy again and said:
-You didn’t recognize me? But you gave birth to me - you, and not another woman. Now I'll leave you. Trees will become my home, I will eat coconuts, and my name will now be the red cockatoo - Piro.
“Don’t say that,” said the mother, “go downstairs and come back home.”
- Now it’s late, I can’t go down, my house will be in the trees. When I was with you, you didn't care about me, but now I will eat bananas and coconuts and laugh at people.
The red parrot flew away and sat on a sago palm that grew above the stream. Soon the girls came for water, and one of them, whose name was Gebae, saw the reflection of the parrot and thought that the bird was there in the water. She jumped into the stream to catch it, but the bird was not there.
- Why did you go into the water? - another girl told her. “There’s a bird up there in the tree.”
The parrot flew to the girls, began to flutter over them, and they caught it. Gebae joked:
“I’ll take him home and hide him there, it will be our husband.” She put the parrot in a basket, and when she returned
home, hung the basket near the place where she slept. The girls lay down and fell asleep. In the middle of the night, Ganumi became human and woke up Gebae.
- Who is this? - she exclaimed.
- It's me, pyro. You caught me and put me in a basket.
Gebae said to herself: “I thought it was a parrot, but it turns out it’s a person!” The young man went to bed with her, and in the morning he returned to the basket. The next night he came to sleep with her again, and Gebae became pregnant. Soon other girls began to say: “Look at Gebae, her nipples have darkened - she’s probably pregnant.” Everyone found out about this, and some women began to scold her, while the rest remained silent. Her father and mother also learned that Gebae was having a child. They became very angry, gathered their fellow villagers and went with them to kill Ganumi.
The red cockatoo flew to the sago palm, threw off its feathers and put them in the hollow of the palm leaf. People cut down the palm tree on which he was hiding with axes, but Ganumi managed to jump to another, and when they began to cut it down, then to a third, and from that to a fourth. He saw his mother from above in the crowd and shouted:
- Viovio, where should I hide? They're about to kill me. Where is my ladder, mother?
The mother untied the rope that held her skirt and threw the end to Ganumi, but the rope was too short, and then she took out Ganumi’s umbilical cord, which she had saved. Ganumi shouted:
“They called me pyro, mother, but now they will call me different names!” They will always call me Ganumi when I shine brightly. Throw me the end of the umbilical cord, mother!
The mother tightly held the end of the rope with the umbilical cord tied in her hand and threw him another - she wanted to pull her son from the tree and hide him in her basket. Ganumi grabbed the end of the umbilical cord, and Viovio pulled it towards her with all her might. But Ganumi held tightly to the tree, and from Viovio’s jerk it first bent towards her, and then straightened out again - with such force that it threw Ganumi’s mother into the sky, and after her Ganumi himself, holding on to the end of the umbilical cord. There Viovio caught him and put him in her basket, and in it she carries him in heaven to this day.
There is a white coating similar to flour on the leaves and trunks of sago palms. Ganumi, when jumping from palm tree to palm tree, smeared his face with it, and since then it has been white. When Ganumi peeks out slightly from her mother's basket, people see the new moon; then he sticks his face out more and more. Sometimes the mother hides the basket behind her back, and then the moon is not visible at all. The mother cannot be seen, only her fingers are sometimes visible in front of Ganumi’s face - these are the spots that we see on the moon.
There are other stories about why Ganumi’s face is white. It is said that one day, when he was still small, his mother was roasting sago, and he was crying and asking to be given some. Angry, she threw a handful at him, the sago covered Ganumi’s face, and where the burnt stuff had landed, there were now dark spots.
Ganumi threw off part of the sago that had stuck to his face, and it fell on the palm trees and even on the ground - crumbs of this sago can still be found, and if a young man eats such a crumb, all the girls will love him. For this purpose, the crumb is sometimes placed under the young man’s armpit, or they rub it on the shell that the young man wears around his neck, or they smear it on the long feather that adorns his head - it swings back and forth and lures the girls. If they want to kill a fat dugong, they also sometimes smear a “crumb of the moon” onto the rope to which the harpoon is tied, and they also give one of the dogs if the hunter wants to drive down a fat wild pig.
Everyone knows how Ganumi appeared, and sometimes lovers, having met, repeat his conversation with Gebae. "Who are you?" - asks the girl. “I am Piro,” the young man replies, “I am Ganumi.”
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru