The stories the
culture thinks with.

Yoashico, the miserable one.

In the old time the sun stood still in the east. There was no fire. People laid their fish on a leaf and let the standing sun warm it. Only the stingy one, Shäno Inca, had fire — and he had paranta, the plantain, and atsa, the manioc, and he meant to keep all three.

He guarded the manioc the way a man guards something he has no intention of sharing: a viper coiled in the crotch of the plant, another around the stem, wasps in the leaves. When people asked for manioc he destroyed the growing eyes first, so nothing they planted came up. When they asked for plantain shoots he cut the trunk in three pieces and gave them that. They planted it. Nothing grew.

What undid him was a bird and a girl not paying attention. His daughter kept a green parakeet, the vëscón. While she swept the plaza, it got behind her and stole a coal from her fire. She threw her brush at it. It flew low, dropped the coal on a dead branch at the corner of her father’s garden, and the branch began to burn.

Shäno Inca sent a tempest to put it out. Then every kind of bird stood over the fire, wings spread against the rain — the vultures, the razor-billed curassow, all of them. Their feathers had been white. The smoke turned them black, and they have been black since. The coal dropped, and the ancestors broke it into pieces and shared it out. And the sun began to move.

Then they had fire and still no crops, so they dug a pit for him. The lizard’s pit only came up to his stomach; he climbed out and they could not kill him. So they called the jori bird, which digs deep, chambered nests underground, and asked whether it could do better. It could. They covered it with leaves and a skin of earth and invited him out for the arrow match — he came jumping, bow ready — and he fell, and they killed him with arrows.

The birds came and bathed in the blood, and that is where they got their colours: the red macaw, the pish-pish. Only the cainqui had gone fishing, and fishing always took him a long time, and by the time he got back the blood had dried. That is why he is a dull orange to this day.

The giant eagle and the clay man.

A giant eagle was taking Shipibo people as they passed through Cocama territory on the Huallaga, on their way to get salt. It would come down out of the mountains — chá, chá, chá — and carry someone off to its cave. The one it takes is the man covered in designs, his whole body painted: the person who is seen.

The answer came from a Cocama, not a Shipibo. Make a false person out of clay, he said. So they modelled a man, dressed him in a tari, put a handkerchief over his head, and set him in the prow of the canoe. Then they made noise — paddles beating the sides, the high falsetto people use to carry a voice across water.

The eagle heard, turned its head, and came. Tojh! — the sound of talons striking mud. Its claws stuck fast in the clay, the weight took it down into the river, and the piranhas finished it. After that, the story says, people could go and get salt and come to no harm.