The Jaguar's Wife is the menacing counterpart to her benevolent husband in the origin of fire. Where the jaguar adopts and feeds the stranded boy, she resents him, bares her teeth, and frightens him as he eats; her husband warns the boy to answer her threats with the small bow he has been given. When the boy at last flees with a burning brand, he turns and wounds or kills her, and it is partly her enmity that fixes the lasting hostility between jaguars and human beings. In her the myth marks the danger that shadows the jaguar's gift: the same household that bestows fire and the bow also harbours the predator's appetite for human flesh.