Page:The naturalist on the River Amazons 1863 v2.djvu/128

 houses. I was inclined to doubt the fact of a serpent striking at its prey from the water, and thought an alligator more likely to be the culprit, although we had not yet met with alligators in the river. Some days afterwards the young men belonging to the different sitios agreed together to go in search of the serpent. They began in a systematic manner, forming two parties each embarked in three or four canoes, and starting from points several miles apart, whence they gradually approximated, searching all the little inlets on both sides the river. The reptile was found at last sunning itself on a log at the mouth of a muddy rivulet, and despatched with harpoons. I saw it the day after it was killed: it was not a very large specimen, measuring only eighteen feet nine inches in length and sixteen inches in circumference at the widest part of the body. I measured skins of the Anaconda afterwards, twenty-one feet in length and two feet in girth. The reptile has a most hideous appearance, owing to its being very broad in the middle and tapering abruptly at both ends. It is very abundant in some parts of the country; nowhere more so than in the Lago Grande, near Santarem, where it is often seen coiled up in the corners of farm-yards, and detested for its habit of carrying off poultry, young calves, or whatever animal it can get within reach of.

At Ega a large Anaconda was once near making a meal of a young lad about ten years of age belonging to one of my neighbours. The father and his son went one day in their montaria a few miles up the Teffé to gather wild fruit; landing on a sloping sandy shore,