The Conquest of Fire (Traditional Amazonian legend)
I
magine what it would be like to live without fire. We couldn’t heat our food and we’d get really cold in winter... There was a time when man had to live like this. Takea the giant was the lord of fire, but he hid it in his cave and wouldn’t share it with anyone. When a Shuar Indian died, they would become a bird and try to steal the fire from Takea’s cave, but no one had ever managed it. The cave doors closed so quickly that no bird had ever been able to escape. Until one day Jempe appeared. Jempe was a very beautiful hummingbird, but he was also very fast and clever. Tired of seeing men suffer from not having fire, he decided to retrieve it. One stormy day, Jempe stood outside Takea’s cave. The giant’s children, fascinated by his beautiful colours and long tail, took him inside the cave. The hummingbird was soaked through, so they took him near to the fire to let him get warm. As soon as he’d dried off, Jempe put his plan into action. The hummingbird put his tail into the flames until it caught fire. Before Takea could react, Jempe flew off as fast as he could and left the cave.
The brave little bird flew and flew until he found some dried branches. With his burning tail, he set fire to the branches and so restored fire to the Shuar Indians. Only then did Jempe look for a river into which to immerse his tail and so put out the flames. From that day on, the Shuar Indians kept the fire always lit and they were never cold again. And Jempe became the only hummingbird in the Amazon to have a tail split in two as the flames had burned the bit in the middle. It’s a reminder of how he managed to steal fire from Takea the giant to give it to men.