Curupira: Brazil's forest guardian with backward feet

In 1560, a Jesuit in Brazil wrote that people climbing a mountain path left feathers, fans and arrows for the corupiras, but he never said what they looked like. Three centuries later, on the rivers of the Amazon, the curupira had become the guardian of the forest, with his feet turned backward: we follow, century by century, what was written about him.

A dull knock on the sapopemas, the great buttress roots, before a storm, a song that leads the hunter farther and farther away, three little wooden crosses and a small ring of vine to break the spell, and a woman from Silves who comes home with a basket of game that fills the whole house: the tales recorded in the 19th century by Couto de Magalhães and Barbosa Rodrigues.