Yakonero is the tragic mother at the heart of the Matsigenka jaguar-origin myth, a local form of the twins-and-the-jaguar tale told across lowland South America. Pregnant and living among her jaguar kin, she is warned by an older jaguar-woman to flee up to the sky to a kindly uncle, but the children in her womb keep distracting her, bidding her stop to pick flowers, so that she loses the path and is set upon and killed by the jaguars. The unborn are saved from her body and fly away as birds, the eldest a hawk, and grow to plot and carry out the killing of the jaguars in revenge, sparing one that escapes to become the ancestor of jaguars living. The myth grounds the Matsigenka understanding of the jaguar as a transformed being and kinsman turned predator.