Ao Ao

Also Known As: also written Aó-Aó; the name repeats the cry the animal makes while hunting
Region/Culture: South America
Mythos: Guarani Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It hunts human beings in packs, tracks them until they can no longer run, and digs out the roots of any tree they climb.
Role in Mythos: It is the man-eater of the Paraguayan forest, the reason the deep bush is somewhere you do not go alone.
Relation to Humans: People are its food, and the tellings say it takes whoever it finds first on the path. The only protection anyone is offered is a tree, and only one kind of tree at that.

The sound arrives before anything else. Three flat syllables somewhere back in the trees, ao-ao-ao, then again from nearer, and a person walking the Paraguayan monte has about a minute to work out what is making it before it stops mattering whether they worked it out at all.

The Guarani telling is careful with its comparison. It says the creature is something like a sheep, which is not the same as saying it is one, and having said that it spends its remaining detail elsewhere: on a great coarse ugly fleece, and on claws that are long and sharp. Those claws are the whole of the method. It does not strangle, crush or poison. It opens what it catches with its nails, and the word the story uses for what it eats is *kritiáno*, Christian, which in rural Paraguayan speech simply means a human being. The Spanish versions say the same thing in fewer words. An animal with the look of a sheep, armed with terrible nails, that devours the people it meets in the forest.

It keeps to the middle of the ka’aguy, the closed forest, and the stories add a detail that does more work than a page of description would: the ordinary animals of the forest do not enter the ground it holds. Picture that green underwater light with nothing moving in it, no birds working the canopy, no rustle in the leaf litter, just the warm smell of rotting wood and the sense of a space that has been vacated. That is the Ao Ao at home, and at home it is quiet.

Hunger is what brings it out. When it and its offspring have gone empty, they leave the forest together and come over the settled country looking for something to eat. They take the trail of the first person they find and follow it, and they do not hurry, because they do not need to. They follow until the running stops.

Then comes the part every version of the story keeps. The person, out of breath and out of options, climbs. The pack arrives underneath and forms a ring around the trunk, and they begin to dig, shouting while they dig, ao-ao-ao, the noise going round and round the tree while those nails work the roots loose and the earth comes up in wet handfuls. The tree leans. Then it goes over. After that it is quick. When they have finished they go back to the places they came from and are not seen again.

Dionisio González Torres, whose compilation fixed the Paraguayan version in print, gives the creature the hills and the mountains as its territory and states the trap plainly: there is no safety underground and no safety in the trees. Which raises the obvious question, and the stories have an answer ready.

One tree. The pindó palm, and nothing else. Get into a pindó and the Ao Ao slackens and loses its strength and cannot dig, and the reason given for this is not mythological at all but Christian. The palm fed the infant Jesus with its ripe fruit while the family was being hunted through Egypt. Palm leaves greeted him at the opening of Holy Week. Paraguayans still carry pindó crowns into church at Easter to honour that death, and because of all this the palm carries *kurundu*, a working charm, and the charm holds against evil things. The rough bark under a person’s hands at the top of one is the whole of their salvation.

Sheep came to the Río de la Plata on Spanish ships, and the Guarani word the telling uses for them, *ovecha*, came with the animal. A forest beast that cannot climb and a palm that witnessed the flight into Egypt are standing in the same story, and neither of them looks embarrassed about it.

The family tree is younger than the beast. In 1929 the Paraguayan poet Narciso R. Colmán, writing as Rosicrán, published *Ñande Ypykuéra*, subtitled an ethnogenetic and mythological poem, a protohistory of the Guarani race. Scholarship takes the book at its word: a romantic recreation of Guarani-Paraguayan origins by a writer whom Rubén Bareiro Saguier placed at the centre of Paraguay’s nationalist indigenist generation, and one who folded what he gathered into a frame borrowed from Judaeo-Christian cosmogony. It is there that the monsters acquire parents. Tau and Kerana, a cursed union, seven children born wrong, and the Ao Ao sixth among them, named in that poem as a god of fecundity, master of hills and mountains, cannibal, father of packs.

The distinction is worth holding on to. The tidy family of seven is a poet’s architecture, laid across material that was already circulating in the countryside as *káso* and *mombe’u gua’u*, the told stories, where fabulous beings drawn in part from indigenous myth had been living for generations without needing a genealogy. The animal in the forest is the old part. The birth certificate is the new one.

Its powers follow from what it is rather than being handed to it. Numbers, because it breeds and hunts with its own young. Stamina, because the chase is a matter of outlasting rather than outrunning. The claws, which serve equally for killing and for engineering. Ground that other animals will not contest. And the cry, which is name and instrument at once, because a creature that announces itself while it circles a tree is not warning anyone, it is telling them how long they have left.

The limits are just as plain. It cannot climb. Everything it can do rests on the ground staying diggable and the prey staying reachable, and a single species of palm takes both away at once. It is a monster undone by botany, and by the odd historical accident that the tree which stops it was made holy by an event that happened on another continent entirely.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Ao Ao in Guarani mythology?

The Ao Ao is a man-eating creature of Paraguayan Guarani folklore, described as roughly sheep-like with a coarse fleece and long, sharp claws. It hunts human beings in packs made up of itself and its offspring, and it is said to rule the hills and mountains. Its claws are what it kills with.

How do you escape the Ao Ao?

You climb a pindó palm, and only a pindó palm. Any other tree the pack will surround and dig out at the roots until it falls, taking the person with it. Under a pindó the Ao Ao loses its strength and cannot dig.

Why can the Ao Ao not touch the pindó palm?

Paraguayan tradition gives the palm a Christian pedigree. It is said to have fed the infant Jesus with its ripe fruit during the flight into Egypt, and its leaves greeted him at the start of Holy Week, so people still carry pindó into church at Easter. That history is held to give the tree a protective charm that evil things cannot cross.

Where does the name Ao Ao come from?

The name repeats the sound the creature makes. The stories describe the pack shouting “ao-ao-ao” while it circles a tree and digs at the roots, and the cry is what the animal is called.

Is the Ao Ao an ancient Guarani myth?

Partly. The forest man-eater and the pindó escape belong to the older popular storytelling of the Paraguayan countryside. The tidy genealogy that makes it the sixth of seven cursed children of Tau and Kerana comes from Narciso R. Colmán’s 1929 poem *Ñande Ypykuéra*, a deliberate literary recreation of Guarani origins rather than a field record.