Word: boa
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...from one, beat half an hour. . . . Hummingbirds: there are more than 500 species. They can fly backward. Staple food is not nectar but insects. . . . Fish: bloodthirsty, nightmarishly ferocious, is the footlong, razor-toothed piranha. A school of piranha consumed a whole sheep in 2½ minutes flat. . . . Domestic note: Boa constrictors are used as pets. They are excellent ratters...
...child in Cleveland, Margaret Bourke White, the Photographer, had a room of her own housing 25 turtles, a baby boa and 200 caterpillars. Her father was a naturalist. Later it was a question with her of which college had the best reptiles to study...
...launches warships, has birthdays, plows fields to prove that he knows the dignity of labor, shatters microphones, lowers the age for little boys to start rifle practice and for little girls to drill with gas masks." If he announces himself "satisfied." like Mussolini after swallowing Ethiopia, "so is a boa constrictor when it has just swallowed a calf. The intermission is only digestive...
...Again, written with a lurid, Sunday-supplement archness, by a daughter of the wealthy and picturesque Crocker family of San Francisco, detailing her travels in the Far East, her love affairs with a Japanese baron, a Chinese tyrant, a Borneo chieftain and a four-yard boa constrictor named Kaa. Aimee Crocker first became aware of the lure of the Orient when, at the age of 10, she demanded that her mother buy her an elaborate Chinese bed that she saw in San Francisco. "Very young indeed was I.'' she writes, "when the finger of the East reached...
...soon divorced, and after melodramatic experiences with Oriental lovers she landed in India. "India." she writes, "here I am. A country whose individual life covers over 4,000 years, and whose living breath had been blowing upon me across broad seas, whose finger had been beckoning me." The boa constrictor did not enter her life until she had returned to New York. The pet of a Hindu princess, it took a strange liking to Miss Crocker, coiled itself around her, stayed with her all the time. She gave an elaborate dinner for it. The dinner was a great success, except...