dared not attack him in the water, so they chose as the scene of 
the slaughter an old log where the boy, after his swim, would 
bask in the sun. There the fish attacked him, and the stingray 
fatally wounded him. The father carried his son into the forest. 
When the dying youth saw his blood drop onto the ground, he 
told his father of the curious plants that would grow wherever his 
blood took root, and he forecast that the roots of these plants 
would avenge his death.” 
The plants, of course, were barbasco. This myth ts strikingly 
reminiscent of the Greek myths about Hyacinthus, from whose 
blood, dropping on the ground, sprang the hyacinth; about Ajax, 
from whose spilled blood a flower sprang up bearing the letters 
AI (woe) on its petals; about Adonis (Tammuz in Syria), from 
whose blood anemones sprang. 
An Arecuna myth from Guyana recounts how a woman 
bathed a male child in a river, and quantities of fish died. Con- 
sequently, she washed the child each time there was a shortage 
of food. Finally the boy was killed by a supernatural being under 
the surface of the water. The woman put the body into a basket 
to carry it home. Blood oozed from the basket, then pieces of 
flesh fell out of it, creating timbo. 
In a myth of the Mundurucu of the central Amazon, a frog- 
sorcerer told a woman whose body was covered with soot to 
bathe in the river, but warned her to face upstream and not to 
look behind her. The soot was washed off and it had the effect of 
timbo; fish died on the surface after beating the water three times 
with their tails. But the woman turned around to see what was 
causing the noise, and the fish came back to life and swam away. 
When the frog-sorcerer came to collect the fish he was furious. If 
she had obeyed him, he told her, Indians would no longer have to 
look for wild timbo. 
A Carib variant, suggestive of the punishment in the garden of 
Eden, begins: ‘‘In ancient times, men knew nothing of disease, 
suffering and death... .’’ The spirits of the forest then lived with 
men. An Indian woman cruelly murdered the baby of one of 
these spirits. In her grief, the spirit declared that henceforth the 
children of men would also die and also know grief. And men 
would no longer be able to drain pools and pick up fish but would 
have to work to find roots with which to poison them. 
These and many similar myths lead to a conclusion that fish- 
poisoning techniques must have been known by South Ameri- 
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