Manuel Vitorino Pinheiro dos Santos had just shot four white-lipped peccaries when he heard it. The horrible soul-wrenching humanlike cry came from a tangle of vines about 50 meters away. "The moment you hear it, all your hairs stand on end," says Dos Santos. He dropped the peccary he was carving up, grabbed the lianas he had cut to lash the carcass to his back, and sprinted in the opposite direction, toward the nearby river. The second scream was farther away, but the trees still shook with the force of the noise. The third and fourth calls were muted, seeming to come from deep in the rain forest as the animal moved away. But Dos Santos waited in the water for an hour or so until he felt safe going back for his peccaries. "I just had a knife and no shells and didn't want to face the creature," he explains.
No one--not Dos Santos or any of the other villagers of Barra do São Manuel, a tiny settlement on the banks of the Tapajós River deep in the Brazilian Amazon, or anyone else in the vast rain forest--relishes facing it, with or without shotgun in hand. Covered in long red hair, standing more than 6 feet on its hind legs, emanating a stench so foul it disorients everyone in sniffing distance, the mapinguari is reputed to be the wildest, rarest, most mysterious and terrifying denizen of the rain forest. It is said to avoid water, to wander with roving herds of white-lipped peccaries and to protect them, to forage at night, to twist huge palm trees apart with its massive claws so it can feast on the soft insides, to have backward-turned feet, and to be generally immune to bullets. The mapinguari is also said to be another Bigfoot, a figment of the imagination of people like Dos Santos--and of a prominent scientist named David C. Oren, whose relentless quest to find one is growing as legendary as the beast itself.
It is to Oren and his mapinguari-seeking swat team that Dos Santos relates his encounter some two months later, standing in the same spot in the forest near Barra. It is late afternoon, and the already dim verdant light of the rain forest is waning. Everyone falls silent as Dos Santos tells his story. Even if nothing lurks behind the massive buttresses of a copaiba tree to one side of the clearing, the mind's eye can see the shadowy form of the mapinguari. The men have all heard the tales, although sometimes the creature is given a different name: capé-lobo (wolf's cape), mão de pilão (pestle hand), pé de garrafa (bottle foot), or juma. Dos Santos says the mapinguari he saw had the claws of a giant armadillo, the face of a monkey, and a nauseating smell, like garlic vine and fetid peccary.
