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It’s likely to strike right at the head, and if it isn’t within striking distance, it can spray its venom, spit it right into your eyes. I know a guy who went blind. But other than those two, the snakes aren’t dangerous, except for the boa, of course, which can crush you to death. So can the anaconda; they live in the rivers. They get to be a few yards long, and they’re very thick around.

‘I’ll tell you something though. The most dangerous animals – worse than snakes and even worse than jaguars – are the wild boars. They have brains. They run in herds, following a leader. Once I was on an expedition, and when we stopped to rest, we were attacked by a pack of boars. There must have been twenty of them. They have vicious tusks and razor-sharp teeth. They caught us off guard. We all ran away, scrambled like hell up the trees. Then those fucking pigs started rooting around the trunks. They were trying to uproot the trees, determined to make a meal of us.’ Karl enjoyed elaborating. ‘We fired a lot of shots at them from up in the trees and finally scared them off after we had killed eight of them. We didn’t have to do any more hunting the entire expedition; we had plenty of smoked meat. Wild boar meat is a real delicacy.’

But we didn’t run into many wild animals other than monkeys, which we frequently saw and even more frequently heard; they made a terrible commotion at night. We did come across tapir and deer tracks every day, but the vast majority of our