Etsa is the Sun of the Shuar and Achuar and the archetypal hunter culture-hero. In the best-known myth-cycle the cannibal ogre Iwia ate Etsa's parents and reared the boy as a captive, sending him out each day to shoot birds for the ogre's table until the forest was nearly emptied of game. A surviving dove revealed the truth of his parentage and taught him to blow the kept feathers from his blowgun, whereupon the birds returned to life and refilled the forest. Etsa then turned on Iwia and destroyed him, and so became the protector of the game animals and the divine model of the skilled, life-restoring hunter. As the Sun he is also a celestial being; the Shuar speak of themselves as kin to the sun and the moon.