The Saci

Pedrinho sets out to capture the Saci, Brazilian folklore's mischievous one-legged trickster who whirls through dust devils and smokes a stub of a pipe, luring him into a bottle stoppered with a cross-marked cork and seizing the red cap that holds his powers. Held prisoner at the ranch, the wily spirit strikes an uneasy bargain with the boy, and Lobato's telling helped fix Saci in the popular imagination as a folk hero rather than a mere bogeyman.