Guardian of the forest
According to the legend, Curupira defends trees, plants, and animals against hunters, loggers, and anyone who damages the forest for its own sake. He is said to frighten intruders with sharp whistling calls and unsettling illusions, and his backward feet are supposed to leave tracks that lead pursuers the wrong way — a trick matched, in the stories, by a speed no human could outrun.
Storytellers also describe him luring young children into the forest, teaching them its secrets, and returning them to their families years later. Visitors who wander into his territory are said to become disoriented by his illusions while he watches, amused, from nearby.
Folklore, not fact
Curupira belongs squarely to oral tradition and has no basis in documented natural history; there is no scientific record of such a being. In some regions the tradition holds that leaving small offerings in the forest — food, arrows, tobacco — keeps him well disposed toward visitors, a detail that says more about the custom's roots in respect for the forest than about the figure's literal existence.
Further
Small, red-haired, with his feet turned backwards so that his tracks lead the wrong way. He guards the trees and the animals, and what he punishes is predation rather than hunting: the accounts are consistent that he grants peace to those taking what they need and torments those who take more. He whistles, he makes illusions, he walks people in circles until they are lost. The hinário footnotes give him a longer name, Currupipipiraguá, and a habit of knocking on hidden trunks before a storm to tell the forest it will hold. In the Daime he belongs to the reading of the forest as inhabited — plants, animals and beings that are part of the spiritual world the works engage.