An Amerindian Short Story…
Long ago, the old people were in our village and there were two big bats that were eating the people.

At that time many people were dying from the bats. The bats ate them. Always when they went out at nights, the bats grabbed them.

They never missed a night. Many people had already died. A person arrived from another village and right away he was thinking what to do. He said to the villagers that anyone that goes out into the night should have fire tied to their arms.

“By doing that we will see where that thing carries our relatives,” he said to them. So it was that any person who went out when it was night tied fire to their arms.

Now when they went out again, the bat arrived and he grabbed one person. Right away they watched him. Then they saw right where he carried their relative. The fire that he carried was good and kept flickering clearly. Then he landed on the top of a big mountain.

The next morning the old men and the young men went with their arrows. When they arrived at the mountain, they went up it, and that mountain was a high one too.

When they arrived on the top of it, they found the bat still eating their relative. They shot it right away, all of them together shooting their own arrows. They killed one bat. The other flew to the Brazil side even while it was daylight.

Each of these bats was a big one. Each was really big, and because of this they were able to carry a big person.

After the people killed the bat, they called that mountain “Bat Mountain”, because they had killed a bat there on top of it. After that the people were not steadily dying, because they had killed the people-eater.