Yoruba narrative tradition explains Ochosi's identity as an enforcer of justice through a single story that costs him more than it costs anyone he ever judges. In the myth, Ochosi, already known for a skill at hunting that never failed, discovered that someone was repeatedly taking birds he had caught and set aside, and in his anger at the theft he called on his own weapon, asking that it strike true against whoever the thief turned out to be, without first learning who that person was. The arrow found its mark exactly as asked. When Ochosi went to see what he had struck, he found his own mother, Yemu, lying where the arrow had reached her, having gone to the birds not to steal them for herself but, in the version of the story most often told, out of simple compassion, releasing creatures she found already caught. Ochosi's justice, summoned in anger and aimed at an unknown thief, had killed the one person the story gives no reason to think deserved it. Storytellers do not use the myth to excuse Ochosi or to condemn him outright; instead it is told as the origin of his character as it is understood ever after, a hunter and a judge whose aim is genuinely unerring and whose verdicts are for that very reason not something to invoke lightly, since a request answered exactly as asked can still land on someone the asker never intended. The myth is also why Ochosi is counted among the warrior orisha received together with Ogun, the smith whose tools make the hunt possible, and Elegua, the orisha who opens or closes the road to whatever is sought, a working trio in which Ochosi supplies the aim rather than the means or the opportunity.