A Story about Living and Dying (And Laughing and Sex)

This is another piece from Elizabeth Marshall Thomas' The Harmless People; it is a story told by the old man Ukwane of the Gikwe  about their god Pishiboro.

Pishiboro was digging a hole.  When he had finished he told his wives to go to look at it while he went out hunting in a different direction, but instead the two wives went to get tsama melons.  They found one melon, brought it home, and, taking out the seeds, were grinding them to powder when Pishiboro arrived.  The two wives had taken their own genital organs and mixed those with the melon seeds which they were grinding.  Pishiboro ate the mixture, which he thought was very nice, and he jumped to his feet and asked his wives where they got such nice meat.
"Oh," They said, "we told you when you left that you were going in the wrong direction.  You should have come to the hole with us because when we got there we found a baby giraffe inside, but we could not get it out, so we cut pieces off its feet, and this was the meat you found so good."
They slept, and the next day they all went to the hole.  The two wives had, in the meantime, defecated into the hole until it was full.  When Pishiboro leaned over it to look for the giraffe, they toppled him in; then, laughing and shrieking, they ran away and climbed into a camel-thorn tree.
From the depth of his hole, Pishiboro looked up at his wives in the tree, and as he looked it came to him what wives were for, and he climbed up the tree and possessed them, and they conceived, and when the children were born they dropped from the tree like fruit.
Then the whole family came down, and as they were walking away Pishiboro found a night adder's home.  Only the baby snakes were there; the parents were gone out.  The Pishiboro family laughed at the baby snakes because they had such ugly faces, and when they had laughed all they could they went home to their scherm.  That night the baby snakes told their mother what had happened, and in the morning, when Pishiboro returned for another laugh, the baby snakes were dancing and the mother snake was hiding in a little hole she had made.  Pishiboro, too, began to dance, and when he danced by the hole the mother snake jumped out and bit him, and although he ran away the poison was working in him, and soon he was ill and in great pain.
The omarambas, the dry valleys in the land, are furrows that Pishiboro made on his way home because he suffered so much, and the hills at the sides of the omarambas were made by his kicking feet.
Pishiboro died from the snake bite, and now all the water that flows in the rivers in the north, all the rain, and all the water that collects in pools is the rottenness of Pishiboro, liquid made as his dead body began to decay.