Carnival
all stories and essays by Avram Klein
Features
Re: Avram
The Animals
Projeto Tamar is a marine biology project working to save the endangered sea turtles of northern Brazil. These turtles are one hundred and fifty million years old. They have dinosaur skin, dinosaur tails, and dinosaur beaked faces.
There are five different kinds of these turtles, and the shells get up to eight feet long. The shell of the hawksbill turtle looks like dragon scales. The baby hawksbill turtles have cute, little smiles and dive straight down in the water and cruise around their tank.
There was a shark tank that seemed to have nothing in it. It looked like there was just a baby shark in there, which turned out to be a sucker fish. I couldn't see into the tank, and I was almost tempted to jump in it so I could say I was the crazy guy who jumped in the shark tank.
The head of the shark that was in this tank was almost four feet wide.
We then took off to Sito do Conde. This is a town with about fifty posadas, thirty beer kiosks, and no tourists.
There was maybe one other couple on the beach with us. A storm passed overhead, allowing for a full double rainbow. The top of the rainbow looked as though it was far away, high above the ocean, while the begining and end were only a few yards away from us on the beach. The inner rainbow was so dense and bright that we couldn't see the waves behind it.
The second rainbow was twice as wide and was less dense. From the inside out, the rainbow had the colors purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and purple. We sat letting the rain splash off our faces and watched it for a half hour.
Karen was listening to the Chemical Brothers on her headphones and was rocking out watching the rainbow, enjoying a twenty-two of Skoll.
The next day I was charged by a bull. We had walked to the next town and on the way back we stopped in a field to look for mushrooms. I was just standing in the field and a bull turned and began to walk straight toward me. He lowered his head and I thought maybe he wanted me to pet him like a horse.
I couldn't read the bull's face at all. I put my hand on his forehead and he kept walking. It was like putting my hand on a slow rolling train. The bull had huge horns, which made me think that the breed was brought to Brazil from the Serengeti.
I could fit between the horns by about a foot and I was planning on jumping on his head and wrapping my arms around the horns to keep from being trampled. The bull bucked his head forward at me and I began to yell, "No! No! Whoa!"
Before my brain could register what was happening, I had already taken off running in a half circle around the side of the bull. Karen and I were laughing so hard that she pulled up her skirt and peed.
I had my revenge the next day at the outdoor market in nearby Conde. There was a butcher's market with bull heads strewn everywhere. There were kids taking a knife to bull heads, cutting the skin and jaws off. We could have purchased cow feet, livers, lungs, anything we may have wanted to throw in a stew. Later that night, I watched bulls being sold on the cow shopping channel which you can check out at www.canalduboi.com.
On the way out of town, we waited for the bus with the locals while a group of dogs kicked the shit out of a stray while the crowd cheered.
One odd thing which is very common in northeastern Brazil is to see animals with little or no meat on their bones. Horses and cows seem to do OK with only skin, but dogs don't seem to fair as well. Their eyes look larger because their bodies are so small.
I bought some cat food for one of them on Boipeba, but he had disappeared, so I fed a dog with with a huge cut on his face. The skinny dog came back for the leftovers later that night.
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