Tsunki is the ancestral being of the water and the first of all shamans, from whom the curing power of the uwishin ultimately derives. Beneath the rivers Tsunki keeps a house where turtles serve as stools and anacondas as hammock-ropes, and it is there, in myth, that a man is taken as son-in-law and returns bearing the tsentsak darts and the songs of healing. Tsunki appears to those at the riverbank as an alluring person of the opposite sex and may draw them into the water world; encounters bring either shamanic power or drowning. The being is glossed sometimes as male, sometimes female, and the term also names the shaman-people who dwell below the water. Tsunki commands the fish, the anaconda and all aquatic creatures.