Adultery and Avocados

The avocado, or alligator pear, a soft and rather salve-like fruit, used pleasantly in salad, was a favorite food of Seriokai when he inhabited the wilds of Guiana, and he often rambled the forests of the Orinoco gathering store of it. During one of these excursions the tapir saw the woman [Seriokai's wife], fell in love with her, and at last won her heart. When the unsuspecting Seriokai went to gather fruit, as usual, his wife followed close with a stone ax, for cutting fuel. As the man was descending an avocado tree she struck at him so vehemently that his right leg fell from his body, and he lay helpless.

Gathering up the fruit, the woman hurried to the tapir’s hiding-place, and the wicked couple went away together. Seriokai was found by a neighbor, who stanched his wound and took him home, where he was nursed back to health. So soon as he could, he mended his leg with a wooden stump; then, armed with bow and arrows, he started after the runaways. Although their path had long been obliterated, the Indian traced them through the wilderness by the avocado trees that had sprung from the seed scattered by the faithless wife.

It was a long and weary following. He climbed mountains and forded rivers, but always there were avocado trees stretching away and away, and leading him nearer to his revenge. The trees grew smaller, showing that they were young. They shrank to saplings. They became mere sprouts. At last there were no trees, but only seeds, and then footprints. And so, at last, he overtook them.

The outraged husband sent an arrow through the body of the tapir just as the beast bounded off from the edge of the world, and, seeing her companion so transfixed, the woman leaped also. Hot in his thirst for vengeance, Seriokai followed, and still he hunts the unrepentant ones through space. He is Orion, the woman is the Pleiades, and the tapir is the Hyades, with bloody eye.

From: Myths and Legends of Flowers, Trees, Fruits, and Plants, by Charles M. Skinner, c. 1911 by J.B. Lippincott Company