Yacana is the largest of the Andean dark cloud constellations, a llama-shaped absence lying along the Milky Way with two bright stars in Centaurus, Alpha and Beta, as its eyes. A smaller dark form beside it is read as its offspring, and it is nursing.
The Huarochiri manuscript is the reason so much of this is recoverable. Compiled around 1600 at the direction of a priest engaged in extirpating idolatry, it is the only substantial account of Andean religion written in Quechua, and it preserves what its informants said rather than what its compiler thought of it. It reports that Yacana comes down at midnight, when nobody sees, and drinks from a spring, and that the water would otherwise flood the world. It adds that a man on whom Yacana descends will be fortunate, and that when it appears black it is a good sign.
The animal in the sky and the animal on the ground are the same subject. The llama was the only large domestic animal the Andes had, the principal sacrifice, the pack animal and the source of wool, and its position at the centre of the sky is proportionate to its position at the centre of everything else.
The order in which Yacana and the other dark animals rise through the year is the herding and planting calendar.