Urutaú

The stump at the edge of the clearing has been there all afternoon, grey and split and about as interesting as a stump. Then the light goes, and it turns its head.

It is a bird, and it has spent the entire day being wood. The common potoo sits bolt upright on a broken stub, bill tilted at the sky, its body pressed into the same line as the timber under it, and the plumage does the rest: mottled bark-brown and ash and soot, streaked and flecked until the join between bird and branch stops existing. It chooses perches roughly its own thickness. Its eyes stay shut, which ought to leave it blind, except that the lids carry two or three narrow notches that never close, so the bird is watching through slits in its own eyelids. Then, well after dark, it sings, and nobody who hears it forgets. Five or six whistled notes, each lower and thinner than the one before, falling away into the trees like a sentence somebody gave up on halfway through.

Along the Paraná and across Paraguay it is the urutaú. In Santiago del Estero, where Quichua rather than Guaraní supplies the names, it is the kakuy. The Guaraní word is usually read as a bird-word bolted onto taú, which is the word for a phantom or a malign spirit, and there really is a Taú in that tradition, the spirit who fathered its seven monsters. Ghost bird, then. The name is not a poetic flourish. Everyone who uses it means that there is a woman inside.

Which woman depends on who is telling it.

The naturalist Moisés Bertoni collected the shortest and strangest version. Urutaú was a woman who tried to follow God into the sky. She kept pace for as long as a person can keep pace with a god, and then she could not, because he had already reached the sun. She wept, and the weeping did not stop, and by the end of it she was the bird. Bertoni’s telling adds a detail with the ring of something observed rather than invented: around October, when the sun where God lives swings closer, she stares straight into it all day without looking away, and when it sets she begins to cry. Wanting too much, in that version, is the entire crime.

The Paraguayan story set down in Guaraní by Lino Trinidad Sanabria takes longer and hurts more. A hard, inflexible cacique named Arakare spares a prisoner of war, a young man called Jaguarainga for his habit of picking fights with jaguars, and brings him back to the village, where the women lose their heads over him more or less immediately. Arakare’s most beautiful daughter is Urutĩ, named for her likeness to a white dove. She asks her father to let her marry the prisoner. He tells her to forget it, and means it, so she walks into the forest and does not come back.

Her father wants her home. A sorceress living in the district finds the exact spot for him, and three trusted men go out and fail: the girl says she will live alone under the trees for the rest of her life unless she gets what she asked for. So Arakare returns to the sorceress, who gives him the advice that ruins everything. Send her a grief large enough to crowd the other one out.

The men went back and told her that her mother and her father were dead. She looked at them and said nothing at all. Then she turned her face toward the horizon and went still, the way carved things are still. One of them leaned in and whispered that Jaguarainga was dead too. She began to shiver as though she were freezing, and her arms lifted and worked as if testing the air, and then her whole body convulsed and a large bird went up off the ground and was lost in the hills above the village.

The cacique got his daughter back as a noise in the dark.

Santiago del Estero tells a different story with the same ending, recorded by Orestes Di Lullo among the Quichua traditions of the province. A brother and sister live alone in a hut in the forest after their parents die. He is patient and she is not. He knows every metre of the bush and brings home whatever it will give him: the fattest algarroba pods, the sweetest mistol, prickly pear, an armadillo off the bank, a fish speared in the slack water, honey from the hives that nest in the ground and from the ones sealed into hollow trunks with grit. She repays him by making his days worse, and appears to enjoy it.

He came home one evening with his hand bleeding, having grabbed at a fallen partridge and put his palm into the low spined cactus they call the one that makes the jaguar cry. He asked her for mead to drink and water to wash the punctures. She fetched both, stood in front of him, and poured them onto the floor.

The next morning she tipped over the pot his breakfast was cooking in, and he stopped being patient. He told her he had found a tree loaded with wild honey. It was an old giant, taller than anything he would normally work without his leather coat and his gauntlets and his smoking horns, and he brought none of them. He threw his lasso over the highest fork, rigged one end as a sling, hoisted her up to the crown with a poncho over her head against the bees, and then made a great show of climbing after her, hacking the branches away with his axe as he went, while in fact he was descending. He slipped the rope free and walked off without a sound.

She spoke. Nobody answered. When she lifted the poncho, the roar of the disturbed swarm was the only thing left in the world, and its noise was what showed her how quiet everything else had gone. She looked out and saw, for the first time in her life, the whole forest from above, the canopy running to the horizon like a dark sea standing in swells, and the sun going down behind it into a night with no stars in it at all.

Her throat shut. Her tongue dried to clay. She shivered as though a cold wind were flaying her, and the remorse arrived all at once and far too late. Her feet, locked around the branch, drew up into owl’s talons. Her nose and her nails hooked over. Both arms, held out rigid, feathered from the shoulder down to the hand. When she understood what she had become, something close to courage tore her off the tree and pushed her out into the dark, and the sound that came out of her was Quichua for my brother. That is still what the kakuy is saying: turay, turay, turay.

What the bird can do follows from what it is. It can be looked at directly and not seen, which is a better defence than teeth; a hunter can stand under the branch and find nothing above him but dead wood. Its voice travels an extraordinary distance for so soft an animal, and it carries a meaning it cannot help carrying, because to hear the urutaú close to the house is not considered good news. It asks nothing of anybody. It builds no nest whatsoever, and lays its single egg in a shallow scar on the top of a stump, out in the open, defended by nothing except the fact that neither the egg nor the bird sitting over it looks like anything worth eating.

Everything else about it is a limitation. It is a night bird with a small bill and an enormous gape for taking moths out of the air, feet built for gripping a perch rather than for killing, and no answer to being found except to freeze harder and hope. Daylight is against it. Movement is against it. And in none of the versions does the woman get out: not the one who chased God too far, not the one who was lied to twice, not the one left up the tree. The call that carries so well across the forest at night is the only part of any of them that still works.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Urutaú?

The Urutaú is a ghost bird of Guaraní legend, understood as a woman who was transformed into a nocturnal bird by grief. The name is generally read as a Guaraní bird-word combined with taú, meaning phantom or spirit. The bird behind the legend is Nyctibius griseus, the common potoo, found in Paraguay, northern Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.

Why does the Urutaú cry at night?

The cry is the woman’s grief, which the transformation never resolved. In the Paraguayan version she is a cacique’s daughter who was forbidden to marry a prisoner of war and then told, falsely, that he had died; her body convulsed and she became a bird. In the version collected by Moisés Bertoni she is a woman who tried to follow God into the sky, could not reach him, and wept until she changed.

Is the Urutaú the same as the Kakuy?

Yes. Kakuy, also spelled Cacuy or Kakui, is the Quichua name used in Santiago del Estero and neighbouring provinces of northern Argentina for the same bird and the same idea. The Quichua legend is a different story: a cruel sister is abandoned high in a honey tree by the brother she tormented, and becomes the bird, calling turay, turay, which means “my brother”.

Is the Urutaú a good or bad omen?

Bad, in most of the places that know it. Hearing the call near a house is widely treated as an ill omen rather than a blessing, which is unusual for a bird that harms nothing and asks for nothing. It hunts moths and other flying insects, lays a single egg on a bare stump, and defends itself only by staying perfectly still.

How does the Urutaú hide?

It disguises itself as dead wood. The Urutaú perches bolt upright on a broken stub of roughly its own thickness with its bill tilted at the sky, and its mottled grey-brown plumage matches the bark so exactly that the outline of the bird disappears into the timber. Its eyelids carry two or three narrow notches that never close, so it can keep watch with its eyes apparently shut.

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