A distant roar

...At first there weren't any rivers either, the waters ran deep under the ground. All you could hear of them was a distant roar, like that of powerful rapids. They formed a great waterway the shamans called Moto uri u. One day Omama was working in his garden with his son when the boy started to cry because he was thirsty. To quench his son's thirst, Omama made a hole in the ground with a metal bar. When he pulled it out, water leaped up to the sky. It pushed back his child, who had come to drink his fill, and shot all the fish, skates and caimans into the sky. The stream rose so high that another river formed on the sky's back, where the ghosts of our dead live. Then the waters accumulated on the earth and ran off in every direction to form the rivers, streams and lakes of the forest...

from The Falling Sky: Wordsof a Yanomami Shaman by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert