Though Fernando’s judgment was far from sound, abruptly to him, it seemed, the character of the Amazonian wilderness grew wilder and more sinister. The looming trees pressed close around him, older and thicker and more ghastly in their contorted forms. The strident animal calls dampened, sounding lower and nearer, eerily menacing in their pitch. Even

Between the wrench of the rope and the heft of the animal, the noose cinched taut around its throat. Jerked to its hindlegs in the stranglehold, the goat bucked and thrashed like a grotesque puppet dancing on its strings. Fernando laughed raspily, unhinged. The rush of savage triumph demented him. As the goat exhausted itself

In retrospect, charging headlong in the dead of night into an unfamiliar wilderness full of vipers, jaguars and other known dangers had been a damn stupid thing to do. But dizzy with resentment, and perhaps even then the incipient effects of the potion, Fernando slashed his way heedless through the verdant brush and trailing vines.

In the scant illumination of the embers, Fernando fumbled for the flashlight he’d brought with him from Chico’s place. The pale beam streamed out before him. Descending the warped wooden steps, he started out across the churned, sticking mud of the yard. He circled around the hulking wreckage of the shack. The nighttime landscape distorted

Outside the forsaken chicken coop, with the bloody spiked maul glistening at his feet, Fernando stood hunched and panting. He considered, as his clarity returned to him, that a more fitting revenge would have been to smash the snake’s skull and slit open its belly to reclaim the stolen eggs. But what was done was