"What does each of you eat? For I have called you so that you may choose your food," said Xbalanqué to them.
"Very well," they answered. And immediately each went to take his [own food] and they all went together. Some went to take rotten things; others went to take grasses; others went to get stones. Others went to gather earth. Varied was the food of the [small] animals and of the large animals.
Behind them the turtle was lingering,[203] it came waddling along to take its food. And reaching at the end [of Hunahpú's body] it assumed the form of the head of Hunahpú, and instantly the eyes were fashioned.
Many soothsayers came, then, from heaven. The Heart of Heaven, Huracán, came to soar over the House of Bats.
It was not easy to finish making the face, but it turned out very well; the hair had a handsome appearance and [the head] could also speak.
But as it was about to dawn and the horizon reddened: "Make it dark again, old one!" the buzzard was told.[204]
"Very well, said the old one,[205] and instantly the old one darkened [the sky]. "Now the buzzard has darkened it," the people say nowadays.
And so, during the cool of dawn, the [Hunahpú] began his existence.
"Will it be good?" they said. "Will it turn out to look like Hunahpú?"
"It is very good," they answered. And really it seemed that the skull had changed itself back into a real head.
[203] Ri tiz coc, literally, "the turtle squeezed or compressed" (inside its shell).
[204] This passage is very difficult to understand in Brasseur de Bourbourg's transcription. The text may be read as follows: Are cut ta chi r'ah zaquiric chi cactarin u xecah, "ยกCa zaquinu chic, ama!," x-u chax ri vuch, since farther on, one reads x-u chax umul, which is said to the rabbit. When transcribing the primitive text, Ximénez wrote chux and not chax, but in his literal translation it is "was said to the buzzard."
It seems to me that those who in this place have translated the verb xaquin as "to open the legs" have also erred. Xaquin in Quiché means to darken, to stain, to soil with soot or coal. Ximénez wisely translates it here as "darken."
Note, also, that following Ximénez, I have translated vuch as "buzzard" (vulture), and not as a fox bitch or tacuatzin as do Brasseur de Bourbourg and others. "Vulture" in Quiché is cuch or kuch, that the Spanish clerics sometimes wrote guch, which has the same sound of vuch or uuch. The meaning in this passage corresponds more nearly to "vulture" or "buzzard," a bird of black plumage. The picture of the buzzard spreading its wings in order to darken the sky and to hide the secret fashioning of the artificial head of Hunahpú belongs to the most genuine expression of aboriginal American mythology.
[205] "ve," x-cha ri mama. The Quiché call the male buzzard mama cuch, "old buzzard." The identity of the creature mentioned here, however, is of no importance. The ancient Indians made use of objects and beings in nature with which to represent imaginary ideas and immaterial things, by means of the similarity of their names. In the present case they were trying, without doubt, to represent the idea of the darkness which immediately precedes the dawn, which they called vuch. Father Thomas Coto thus explains the significance of the word vuch: "It signifies that darkening of the sky when it is about to dawn." In order to represent this idea, the Indians traced the figure of the animal whose name sounded like the word they were trying to suggest.
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