 In the end, the peasants assuage their hunger by defying the holy man and slaughtering and eating the sacred ox.Director Ruy Guerra originally conceived on the story in 1958 and planned to film it in Greece with a plot revolving around a band of soldiers trying to defend a village from a pack of hungry wolves because a government ordinance prohibits the villagers from carrying firearms for fear of popular revolt.In Guerra's original story, tensions between the villagers and the visiting soldiers escalate into conflict, and a soldier kills one of the locals.