In the Bunun deluge myth, when the ancestors marooned on the mountain summits had no fire, the toad was the first creature to volunteer to fetch it from a distant burning peak. Carrying an ember, it swam back through the floodwaters, but when it dived the fire was extinguished; the kaipis bird then completed the quest. Despite its failure the toad is honoured in Bunun tradition: killing toads is traditionally forbidden in memory of its courage, and some tellings attribute the warty blisters of the toad's skin to the burns it suffered. The episode appears in the Bunun texts collected by Ogawa and Asai (1935) and in Ho Ting-jui's comparative treatment of Formosan flood myths (1971).