Then we proceeded to skin the snake, which was no easy task under the fierce sun now baking our backs.  Great flocks of urubus, or vultures, had smelled the carcass and were circling above our heads waiting for their share of the spoils.  Each man had his section to work on, using a wooden club and his machete.  The snake had been laid on its belly and it was split open, following the spinal column throughout its length, the ventral part being far too hard and unyielding.  About two o’clock in the afternoon we had the work finished and the carcass was thrown into the river, where it was instantly set upon by the vigilant piranhas and alligators.

Standing in front of this immense skin I could not withhold my elation.

“Men,” I said, “here am I on this the 29th day of July, 1910, standing before a snake-skin the size of which is wonderful.  When I return to my people in the United States of America, and tell them that I have seen and killed a boa-constrictor nearly eighteen metres in length, they will laugh and call me a man with a bad tongue.”

Whereupon my friend, the chief, rose to his full height and exclaimed in a grieved tone:  “Sir, you say that your people in the north will not believe that we have snakes like this or even larger.  That is an insult to Brazilians, yet you tell us that in your town Nova York there are barracaos that have thirty-five or even forty stories on top of each other!  How do you expect us to believe such an improbable tale as that?”

I was in a sad plight between two realities of such mighty proportions that they could be disbelieved in localities far removed from each other.

We brought the skin to headquarters, where I prepared it with arsenical soap and boxed it for later shipment to New York.  The skin measured, when dried, 54 feet 8 inches, with a width of 5 feet 1 inch.

Kind reader, if you have grown weary of my accounts of the reptilian life of the Amazon, forgive me, but such an important role does this life play in the every-day experience of the brave rubber-workers that the descriptions could not be omitted.  A story of life in the Amazon jungle without them would be a deficient one, indeed.

There is a bird in the forests, before referred to, called by the Indians “A mae da lua,” or the “Mother of the Moon.”  It is an owl and makes its habitation in the large, dead, hollow trees in the depths of the jungle, far away from the river front, and it will fly out of its nest only on still, moonlit nights, to pour forth its desolate and melancholy song.  This consists of four notes uttered in a major key, then a short pause lasting but a few seconds, followed by another four notes in the corresponding minor key.  After a little while the last two notes in the minor key will be heard and then all is still.