O Curupira — a Brazilian legend in easy Portuguese

The Curupira is the guardian of the Brazilian forest and the animals in it. He is small, the size of a boy, with hair as red as fire and feet that point backwards. The feet are the heart of the legend: a hunter who finds his footprints and follows them walks the wrong way, deeper into the forest, until he is lost. He whistles, he bangs on the great roots of the trees, and in Monteiro Lobato's telling he sings a nonsense song, "Currupaco, papaco". He is not a monster. He punishes greed and cruelty, and he forgives.

The legend is Tupi, and one of the oldest written down in Brazil: the Jesuit José de Anchieta described the Curupira in a letter of 1560. It is told across the whole country, as Curupira in the north and often as Currupira in the south. Couto de Magalhães, in O Selvagem (1876), records him as the forest's protector who bangs the roots to test the trees before a storm and makes whoever harms them wander lost. Monteiro Lobato, in O Saci (1921), gives the rule this story is built on: hunting to eat is allowed, but whoever kills for cruelty, or kills a mother with young, is led astray.

That rule is the point of the story: the forest gives food, not profit. The hunter's way back is an offering. In the tradition it is tobacco or cachaça left for the Curupira; in the story Chico hands over his fumo, his tobacco, as a gift. A few words to notice as you read: veado is the ordinary word for a deer, but in slang it is also an insult, so learners should not use it loosely outside a story like this; and pegar appears in two senses, to catch ("agora eu te pego") and to take ("Chico pega o fumo").