Never wanting to risk the loss of a potential meal, Paco tightened around her prey as if it were alive and wouldn't let go with tooth or coil until she sensed the squirrel wasn't breathing. Take home the squirrel, dangle it by its bushy tail through the top door of the cage, and Paco would lunge toward the lifeless rodent, grab it with most of her 100-plus sharply decurved teeth, draw it back into the cage in a flash, and wrap it tightly with a few coils of her sinuous serpentine body. Instead we simply kept a plastic bag in the back of our van and stopped on our travels to collect any fresh, road-killed squirrels we came across. It's often the case that big snakes do not eat well in captivity, but with Paco that was never a problem, and-even more unusual-we never had to sacrifice live animals to satisfy her hunger. (We sometimes wondered if she took diabolical delight from repeatedly sticking her tail up our pants leg in front of giggling elementary school kids.) She could put on a hard squeeze, of course-a natural reaction that kept her from falling while being handled-and many times we had to start at her weaker end to untwine her from us or a student. (After some long days, she tended to get a little limp-more like spaghetti than a Boa Constrictor-and we were pretty worn out, too.) She did have the nerve-wracking habit of striking the window of her cage if we walked by when she was hungry-the thud of nose against Plexiglas was always startling-but once in the hand she was guaranteed not to bite. Boa Constructors are typically non-aggressive-that's why hoochie-koochie dancers use this species instead of less predictable pythons or Anacondas-but Paco never struck at anybody even after six back-to-back one-hour periods of classroom presentations. One of Paco's greatest attributes was her mild temperament. She was a rock-solid mass of bone and muscle, however, and once tipped the scales at 35 pounds-quite a load when handling her in front of a school library filled with a hundred or so wide-eyed first-graders. As often happens with snakes, Paco's growth rate slowed considerably as she got older, and in the past ten years or so she "only" gained 27" in length. By the time we took her to the Governor's School she was about seven feet long and six inches in diameter. When Fred first received Paco she was just a puppy-only a couple of feet long a steady diet of small mammals helped her bulk up and lengthen pretty rapidly. Thus, counting backwards, we estimate that Paco was at least 20 years old at the time of her passing-pretty good for a species that seldom lives for three decades. It was Fred, we believe, who named the snake "Paco"-derived from "Rat Apocalypse." Fred had gotten Paco in about 1986 from one of his own students who, in turn, had acquired the U.S.-born snake several years earlier from a cousin in Ohio. Prior to then she had resided in the Rock Hill science classroom of close friend Fred Nims, an instructor at Westminster-Catawba School and former student from our teaching days at Fort Mill High. Paco came to us back in 1988 when we helped start the South Carolina Governor School for Science and Mathematics in Hartsville-more about that later-where she graced our biology classroom and served as the quintessential example when we studied reptilian behavior.
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