A hunter sat down to rest under an enormous tree, distressed because the day's hunt had given him nothing. Desperate, he started back to his hut, and a few steps along he stopped dead, terrified: on the ground lay a human head, apparently cut off. The forest fell into total silence, without even the song of the birds, and the man's body froze with fear. He asked himself in a low voice who could have killed that man. Then, as if it had heard him, the head began to speak.
Confused, and more shaken by what he heard than by what he saw, he wanted to leave, but curiosity won out and he went back to ask the head who had taken its life. It answered: “The mouth.” The hunter fled toward his village and, downcast, lay down to rest, trying to forget what had happened.
An old man who was smoking his pipe asked him why he was coming back without any game for food. The young man explained his day: he had crossed the stream where the animals drink, had climbed the hills where the tiger had its den and had looked for a deer without finding one. On the way back he came upon a human head, stained with blood and dirt, with eyes half closed toward the sky and lips curved in a sinister smile. He asked it who had killed it, and it answered that it was the mouth.
The news spread through the town. No one believed the boy's account, but everyone went with him to the spot. On reaching the head, the hunter repeated his question, who had killed the head, and this time no one heard an answer or the slightest sound. The villagers, indignant at the young man's supposed lie, found him guilty and sentenced him to death.
Telling something extraordinary without being able to prove it can cost a life, because people believe only what they see. Speaking too much and at the wrong time harms the one who speaks, and this path teaches measuring one's words.
One must have Osain and fulfill obligations to the dead: a mass is held for the elder dead. Whoever has a Palo cauldron must attend to it, since it demands its food.
The person suffers from the fault of talking too much.