Rubber, the tapper's knife

You can tell by the dirt under my nails that I ain't a doctor. You can also see that this rubber tapper's knife has been around for a long time. It belongs to Sr. Raimundo Teixeira, who used to be my neighbor across the road from Bosque Santa Lucia. His son, Cleuson, works for me now and I saw him with the old tool yesterday as he left to meet a group of Germans coming from a ship that had stopped at Alter do Chao. Unfortunately, the tour was canceled because the ship arrived much to late to begin any tours. Cleuson and I waited most of the afternoon without knowing that the tour wasn't going to happen. I took advantage of the downtime to get some pictures of knife. Notice that the metal at the end of the blade has been doubled back to make for a "u" shaped cut on the rubber tree. This regulates the depth of the cut, therefore not damaging the tree. That picture I showed on the previous post was done with the whack of my machete, which isn't recommended.