Boraro

Region/Culture: South America (Tukano and Desana peoples of the Vaupés region)
Mythos: Indigenous South American Mythology, Colombian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Crushes a victim in a bone-pulping embrace that leaves the skin intact, then drains the body of everything inside it.
Role in Mythos: A guardian spirit of the deep forest that hunts people who stray too far or kill game without need.
Relation to Humans: It preys on hunters and travelers caught alone away from the village, particularly those who waste the animals it protects. A person can survive an encounter by offering it tobacco or by tricking its jointless legs so that it falls and cannot rise.

The footprints lead toward the river, so the hunter who knows the forest turns and walks away from the river. That is among the first things the Tukano teach about the Boraro. Its feet are set on backward, and the track that seems to show where the creature went shows instead where it came from. Follow the toes and you walk straight into its arms.

It is enormous, taller than a man and built like one gone wrong. The skin is pale, almost bloodless, which is why the people who fear it call it the Pale One. Over that pallor grows a pelt of coarse black hair, thickest across the chest. The ears stand forward off the skull like a listening animal’s. The mouth carries fangs. A heavy phallus hangs between its legs, and those legs are the strangest thing about it, because they have no knees. The Boraro moves on stiff columns of bone, and when it walks the whole body sways with the effort. Some who have described it slide toward the shape of a jaguar standing upright, a fanged cat wearing a man’s frame, which says something about what the forest near the Vaupés considers the apex of menace.

It belongs to the order of beings that own the forest rather than live in it. In the Tukano world the game animals are not free for the taking. They are herded and guarded by spirit masters, chief among them Vaí-mahsë, the keeper of the animals, who decides which creatures a hunter may kill and exacts a price for every one taken in excess. The Boraro works that same logic with its hands. Where the master of animals keeps a ledger, the Boraro keeps the body of anyone who falls behind on it. It patrols the places people are not supposed to be, the deep stands of trees far from the cleared ground of the village, and it listens, with those forward ears, for someone moving where they should not.

The killing is not quick. The Boraro takes its victim into an embrace and tightens, and the pressure pulps the flesh and shatters the bone inside, yet the skin does not tear. What was a person becomes a sack of ruin that still holds its shape. Then the creature opens a small hole in the crown of the skull and drinks, drawing out everything the body contained until only the emptied envelope of skin remains. It inflates this husk with breath, stands it on its feet, and sends it walking back toward home. The thing arrives looking almost like the man who left. It greets the people it knew. Then it falls down and is finished, and only afterward do they understand what came back to them.

A normal day for the Boraro is quieter than that. A hunter strips more game than his family can eat, or kills a creature carrying young, and somewhere in the trees a pale shape lifts its head. The forest goes still in the way it does before something happens. There is a smell of rot on a wind that should be carrying river damp, and the birds quit. That stillness is the warning, and most who feel it have already walked too far to use it.

There are ways out. Tobacco is one. The Boraro can be appeased with it, offered up by a traveler who has the presence of mind to carry some and the steadiness to hand it over while the creature looms, and a shaman armed with tobacco smoke and the right words has standing the ordinary person does not. The other escape is crueler and more satisfying. Because the Boraro has no knees, it cannot get up quickly once it goes down. A person being chased can stop at one of its own backward prints, press both hands flat into the impression, and by some sympathy between the track and the foot that made it, the creature’s legs lock. It topples. It lies in the leaf litter working its stiff limbs like an overturned beetle while the human it meant to drink walks home alive. The forest’s guardian, brought down by the shape of its own footstep.

Its powers run straight out of its purpose. It is strong enough to crush a body without breaking the surface because it was made to enforce, not to feed in any ordinary sense. It does not eat the flesh. The backward feet protect the thing that protects the forest, turning every pursuit into a circle that closes on the hunter. Its forward ears catch the sound of trespass. And every one of these gifts carries the flaw stitched into it. The legs that let it stand like a man cannot fold to let it stand again once felled. The hunger that empties a victim can be turned aside by a pinch of cured leaf. A creature built to punish people for taking too much can be beaten by anyone calm enough to give a little, or quick enough to read a footprint backward.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Boraro?

The Boraro is a man-eating forest spirit from the mythology of the Tukano and Desana peoples of the northwest Amazon, in the Vaupés region of Colombia and Brazil. Its name means “the Pale One,” and it serves as a guardian of the forest’s game animals, hunting people who trespass or kill wastefully.

Why does the Boraro have backward feet?

The Boraro’s feet point backward so that its tracks deceive anyone trying to follow it. A person who trails the toes walks toward the creature rather than away from it, and the spirit itself leaves a confusing trail that cannot be tracked. The same backward print becomes its weakness: pressing your hands into one locks its legs.

How does the Boraro kill its victims?

The Boraro crushes a victim in a tight embrace that pulps the flesh and breaks the bones without tearing the skin. It then drinks the body’s insides through a small hole opened in the skull, inflates the empty skin with breath, and sends the hollow husk staggering home, where it greets its family and then collapses dead.

How can you survive an encounter with the Boraro?

A person can survive the Boraro by offering it tobacco, which appeases the creature, or by exploiting its jointless legs. Because the Boraro has no knees, pressing both hands into one of its backward footprints causes its legs to lock, making it fall and struggle to rise while the intended victim escapes.

Is the Boraro the same as the Curupira?

The Boraro is not the same being as the Curupira, but the two share the role of backward-footed forest guardian and are often compared. The Curupira of Brazilian folklore is a smaller, trickster-like protector of wildlife, while the Boraro of the Tukano is a towering, pale, man-eating spirit whose punishment of careless hunters is far more lethal.