The Jaguar is the first master of fire in Kayapó myth and the ambivalent benefactor of humankind. In the age before people cooked, the jaguar alone kept a hearth, roasted its meat, and knew the bow and the cotton hunting-cord. Finding the boy stranded on the cliff, it adopts him, carries him home in its game-basket, and feeds him roasted meat, giving him also a small bow. When the boy flees with fire and the people seize it, the jaguar keeps only the reflection of flame in its eyes and is thereafter condemned to hunt and devour its prey raw. Turner reads the jaguar as the wild double of human society, at once the source of culture's arts and the predator against which culture defines itself; the loss of fire fixes the enmity between people and the great cat that the Kayapó dramatize in ritual and hunting.