O Boitatá — a short story in easy Portuguese

The Boitatá is a snake made of fire that guards the fields. Its name is Tupi, mboi-tatá, the fire snake, and it is one of the oldest Brazilian legends on record: the Jesuit José de Anchieta mentioned the baetatá in a letter of 1560. It sleeps in the water by day and roams the fields by night, a long glowing body with two enormous eyes, and it punishes whoever sets fire to the fields for nothing. In the South of Brazil, where this story is set, the glow seen over wet fields on dark nights is still called the Boitatá; other regions say Batatão or Biatatá.

Couto de Magalhães, in O Selvagem (1876), describes it as the spirit that protects the fields against those who burn them, a small serpent of fire that lives in the water. Monteiro Lobato, in O Saci (1921), explains the eyes: during a great flood the snake hid in a hole on the highest ground and stayed so long in the dark that its body shrank and its eyes grew, so that it sees everything at night and nothing by day, like the owls. This retelling keeps the flood in one line, the colours, blue, white and gold, and the rule: whoever burns the field burns with it.

The story is also about something real. Burning dry fields to clear them, the queimada, is still a problem in Brazil, and the Boitatá puts the fire out by circling it until it has no air. Two things to notice in the Portuguese: "Não queima!" is the spoken form of the negative command, and Seu before a name is the rural, respectful Mr: Seu Bento.