counterclockwise

Back before I left for Paraguay, I described the country to a few of you as the place where biologists go to slog through the marshes and eventually wrestle out snakes the size of water mains for the benefit of National Geographic’s cameras.

Well, it took me sixteen months, but here finally is a snake the size of a water main.

She was an anaconda, indigenous to the region, 6 meters (20 feet) long, and of unknown-but-surely-impressive age and weight. Not just impressive to me, either. Although the species is common enough out here, finding one of this size is a once-in-a-generation event. Given what’s happened to local fish populations lately, it may be a once-in-a-lifetime event now.

Two guys out fishing on the Rio Ypané found her, along an untouched stretch of river a few kilometers downstream from the town’s busy, noisy beach. She had just eaten, for which reason she couldn’t dive to escape them. So they did what most Paraguayans would like to do upon encountering a snake longer than some aircraft, and bashed her head in.

Eventually, they got her body loaded on the boat trailer and towed her through town for an impromptu parade. By this time, it was twilight, so I was stuck using my camera’s flash. And she was so long that her head and tail both hung off the ends of the trailer. So I’m sad to say that I have no pictures of her stretched to her full length - you have to see her by halves.

In the picture above, you can see the bulge of her last meal at about the halfway point in her body. In the next photo, you can see from the bulge to where her tail hangs off the trailer. And in the one after that, you can see from the bulge in the opposite direction.

The bulge was the subject of all kinds of speculation. I heard theories that it might be everything from a calf to a horse to a person to another snake to a shark. So at the end of the parade route, we all gathered ’round as a few especially tough ranch hands slowly relieved her of one gorgeous snake skin and a nasty, stinking capybara.

The world’s largest rodent is ugly in life, and repulsive even when expertly cooked. Half digested in the belly of a hours-dead giant snake, it can singe human nose hairs at a distance of ten paces. I took pictures anyways, but they are pretty bloody. View at your own risk.
Cutting open the belly
The capybara emerges
The whole ugly thing

So that’s the end of the largest snake I’ve ever seen. I wish I could have seen her in life. I wish, for that matter, that she were still alive. But all the same, I wouldn’t sell my experience having seen her for any sum you could offer.

The Guaraní word of the day, naturally enough, is kuriju, meaning anaconda. No fewer than twice during the Giant Snake Parade, I overheard people saying that they hadn’t previously believed that the kuriju was a real animal. Paraguayan TV channels run really supremely stupid schlock horror movies on Sunday afternoons when there’s not a futbol game or telenovela to be had. And given the believability deficits inherent in the genre, it’s understandable that no one was taking the creature du jour seriously.

Summer break in Tacuatí just got a little more interesting. Ahecha Paraguay is coming out here. It’s a project for teaching photography to youth. My site mate and I will be able to borrow five high quality digital cameras to teach kids the basics of composition and choosing shots. If you’ve seen the documentary Born into Brothels, you’ll have some idea of how this goes. We hope to start classes after school lets out for the summer, get cameras in January, and then develop and exhibit the photos starting in Februrary.

Now for the bad news. First I was a single woman putting her cat on the Internet. Then it was another cat. Then it was two cats and crochet projects. And now - have mercy! - the carnage count extends to cats, crochet projects, and a kitten. Consider this my cry for help. Lock me in a padded rubber room, put me on potent pharmaceuticals, or just turn me on to a new hobby. I can’t go on like this.

Mimosa had a wee contraceptive failure, resulting in her first (and hopefully only) litter. Only two kittens were born. By the lump-counting method, I’d expected twice that number, and only one has survived. The one still with us is the darker one of the left. I’m not naming him, because I’m not keeping him. He’s been promised to a family in town. For perhaps the first time in Paraguay’s history, the owner of a female cat has more requests for kittens than she has of same to deliver. I can’t tempt fate that that’ll happen again.

The Guaraní word of the day is memby, meaning son. And ta’ýra, meaning the same thing. But Guaraní is funny about this one. There are two words for son, and two words for daughter. And which one you use depends on which parent’s perspective you’re referencing. So, for example, I am my mother’s memby kuña and my father’s tajýra. As a woman, I might have membykuera and memby kuñakuera, but I will never have ta’ýrakuera and tajýrakuera.

Unless, of course, I become one of those women obsessed by her wretched cats, in which case all talk of a future family is a moot point.