Word: constrictors
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...nearly so full flavored. A dog nicely cooked is better than cat." Puleston saw some strange sights: a human sacrifice of over 100 victims, to provide a bath of blood for a native king; a crucifixion; a fight between two crocodiles, between a native and a boa constrictor. Twice he met Explorer Stanley, "discoverer" of Livingstone. Says Puleston: Stanley's real name was John Rowlands...
...This "sucuri" was an anaconda, water-dwelling member of the boa-constrictor family.* Far more ill-tempered than its cousins, the African boas and the pythons of Africa, Asia and Australia, it is the largest snake in the New World, third largest in all the world (after the reticulated and Indian pythons, which sometimes exceed ten yards in length...
...known, is tender and sweet. Toasted grasshoppers have a nutty flavor. Earth worms, washed clean and gently stewed, have a tangy tartness. Eels even cooked retain their stench of the sea. Snakes. . . . An atavistic nausea sickened the boys. Black jungle folk might drool over the carcass of a boa constrictor. But Penn State students! None the less they were themselves to eat snake flesh to maintain a college tradition. Goggly-eyed, some watched their cook strip the skin from five rattlesnakes, gut them, parboil the sleek joints. The 20 freshmen ate, wearing the green grin of bravado...
...Berlin, in the Circus Busch, one Labero, hypnotist, made passes at a python. Unentranced, the python grasped Labero's hand so firmly in its jaws that it broke off a tooth. Dismissing the python, Labero put to sleep crocodiles, hens, guinea pigs, rabbits, a boa constrictor. Came an eagle. The eagle fastened its beak deeply into the hand gnawed by the python, but toppled over unconscious at the same moment that Labero fainted from loss of blood. The next subject on the bill was a lion. Said critics: "It's lucky Labero fainted...
...Hamburg, Germany, lived a boa constrictor. He was the pride of the municipal zoo, and all day he reclined in his cell, staring down with absorbed eyes at his scaled and glittering body. The keeper, observing this, reflected: "How beautiful he is to himself, this hideous creature." One day, a few minutes late with the boa constrictor's supper, the keeper hurried into his cage to find him stretched on the floor, in the shape of a great stiff zero with one end of him inside the other. He had tried to eat his tail; his teeth had become...