The Apinayé, a native Amazonian people of Brazil, had a tale about a preternatural named Tečware which the Brazilian collector Curt Nimuendajú noted in the 1930s.159 It is a good brief example of the Two Trees in native South American fable, and it is about a mortal contest of deception between two affinally related males.
Tečware (whose name means “sharpened-leg”) went with his brother-in-law to the woods to hunt. While they are resting by their fire at night, Tečware thrusts his leg into the fire and burns off his foot. He throws the charred foot at a piquy tree, then wakens his sleeping relative and sends him to collect the fruit which he says has just fallen from the tree so that they can roast and eat it. The brother-in-law looks for the fruit in vain; meanwhile Tečware whittles his shin-bone to a sharp point. In the morning he attempts to stab his brother-in-law to death with his sharpened leg bone, but the latter escapes to the village where he reports the incident to his fellow citizens.
Tečware stealthily invades the village and kills sleeping men on subsequent nights. The survivors paint a log from the trunk of a mamohy tree to give it the appearance of a man; Tečware attacks it at night but the sharp point of his leg-bone sticks in the hewn wood preventing his escape, and the citizens beat him to death. They behead the corpse, but the head is still alive and gets away into the woods. It begins to kill people in broad daylight. The villagers trap the head in a pitfall, cudgel it to death with clubs, and bury it deep so that it will not murder again. A mangaba tree rises from the grave.
The preternatural’s green piquy tree in the wilderness seems by night to offer its mortal visitor a gratuitous bounty of herbaceous food, but by day it is the scene of a sudden, unexpected, and nearly successful attempt on his life. Contrastingly, the hewn mamohy log set up to give the appearance of a man in the middle of the village is a calculated implement of civilization devised to impose the law of retribution on a murderous ogre who is heedless of the boundary between a civilized precinct and his own lawless zone of wilderness. Himself suspiciously like green wood (which grows the better for being hewn), Tečware at the fruiting piquy tree is immune to the law that levies an unalterable price of pain and crippling upon any ordinary man who might willfully or otherwise burn his foot to the bone. But Tečware at the hewn mamohy log pays the civilized price of death for his own acts of murder.
Again as though he were himself a thing of live wood, Tečware when his head is hewn off only grows stronger and more terrible for the cutting. Now he does not even keep to the concealment of night, but reveals himself to commit his gratuitous murders in broad daylight. When the villagers armed with clubs seek him in the green woods, he darts among them untouched by their attempts to hit him and so stop his vicious mobility. Only when they return to the civilized precinct of their roadways and dig pitfalls along the edges of the roads are the villagers successful, for only when he attempts to cross out of the wild and invades the roads is Tečware finally laid low under the blows of men manipulating wooden cudgels. Yet even then the mangaba tree rises green over the place where he is confined in the earth.