Upon Further Inspection...

This story begins with one peaceful night in a sleepy little town called Taimati. I was relaxing in the mosquito net on my bed, having enjoyed a double feature at the local cinema (yeah, we set up a projector in the school and had a comedy and an action movie that day, both dubbed over in Spanish, for only 25 cents each, it was great) and reflecting on my life here. All of the sudden I heard a splat on the floor. I assumed that one of the two bats that is presently plaguing the kitchen at night in search of plantains had decided to relieve himself mid-flight within my room, so I slowly found my hand lamp and shined it onto my floor in search of the noise's source.

That is when I took note that indeed NOPE, NOT BAT POOP. BIG SPIDER. As it so happened a large black tarantula had fallen off something or otherwise leapt onto my floor. He froze when I shined the light on him and so I turned it off for a few minutes to listen for his movements. When I heard him creeping along the floor I turned the light back on and saw that he had relocated himself to the base of the wall. This put me in a predicament. You see I should take a moment here to explain the sanctity of a volunteer’s mosquito net. It is the only space that is truly yours. Your host family gives you a room, and when you are living alone you have your own small house, but even those areas are intruded by nature. Nothing enters my mosquito net, and if it does I swiftly hand out justice in the form of a merciless death sentence as soon as the creature appears for trial. So there I find myself, in my happy place, trying to decide if I would exit the safety of the net in order to wage half-naked war on this new-found conquistador or if I would let him go and deal with the paranoia of not knowing where he is in the morning. As you can tell this is no easy decision, so I took my time and would check back on him every minute or so in the hopes that he would raise a white flag and passively leave or set himself on fire . Either way I just wanted him gone. No, these options weren’t good enough for the tarantula as he chose to slowly creep towards my defenseless shoes. Now there is a difference between waking up the next day and not knowing whether the tarantula is in the house or outside and waking up the next day knowing the tarantula is likely within my belongings. I could NOT stand for this. I MUST defend the shoes. 

I carefully exited my mosquito net and tried to decide whether I should whack him with a Chaco, or my hiking shoes. As I weighed the two options in my hands the spider made a quick side step to show that he noticed me noticing him. That is when I decided that this was no ordinary foe. I decided to forgo the shoe and instead picked up a metal rod I had laying around for reasons such as this. I carefully lifted the rod to the heavens and lined up my shot. I delivered swift justice on the intruder and smote him in the helm which gave way to a simultaneously satisfying and unnerving crunch/squish. I had won a victory worthy of the fables! All I was missing was a distressed princess. Now for the matter of body disposal, it was far too late to have a proper funeral pyre so I figured I would sweep him out of the house so the ants would not invade next, but as I pushed him out of my room the two bats in the kitchen started swooping down at my headlamp! I decided this was quite enough and I would just leave the tarantula’s remains in the kitchen as a sacrifice to satiate the blood thirst of the bats. (Notably we did finish sweeping him out in the morning). I returned to the safety of my bed and rested the night away.

You may be wondering why this blog post continues here, but it does. I woke up the next morning and had breakfast all business as usual. I relaxed a little while before deciding that I would try to go visit Matt in Cemaco. I was leaving the house when I thought “I should get my camera to take some photos of Cemaco and maybe some butterflies or something along the way,” so I returned to grab that and then was on my way. As I started down the trail I saw about 2’ of a 4’ snake laying across the trail. I recognized the pattern as a type of rat snake they have down here so I was not too afraid, but he had apparently heard of my recent vanquishing of the mighty black tarantula because he slithered off into the bush fairly quickly, never looking back.

I continued on the path and everything was status quo, a little muddy in parts but otherwise normal. I had come to a tiny concrete bridge that is within 10 minutes of Cemaco when I looked up ahead on the trail and saw a dog walking around. I was hoping he wouldn’t try to get angry as I passed him but I did notice that he was a little strange looking from a distance. “Mange?” I wondered as I looked up to inspect him still from a safe distance. NOPE, NOT A DOG. LEOPARD! Holy Moly! There I was on the trail between our two little towns all alone and probably 25 yards away is a leopard. That is when I learned that the jungle may be hot, and it may be humid, but it is still very possible to get goose bumps. I ran through every survival show that I had ever seen in my head to think of what to do, but luckily it had not noticed me. I quietly took out my camera (SO happy I decided to take it that time) and snapped a photo from far away.

It is kind of far away in the photo.

 

This zoom version you can see his spots on his shoulders!

The photo may not be the best quality, but you come across a leopard in the jungle alone with only a camera and your clothes and see how close you get. From his relaxed disposition I decided to act under the presumption that this leopard had not heard of my victory against the tarantula or that if he had it left him unimpressed, so I took care to quietly back away without being noticed and get back to Taimati. There I shared the story with people who mostly did not believe it until I showed them the photo. So the moral of this story kids is that you should always double check things! That bat poop might actually be a terrifying tarantula, and the dog…well most likely it would still be a dog just statistically speaking….but it could be leopard! 

   

P.S. Thank you God for both delivering me safely back to Taimati and for giving me the opportunity to see such an incredibly beautiful and rare animal in its natural habitat.