This happened in the summer of 1991, February. I was working for a wildlife survey team in the Gran Chaco, the dry forest region in western Paraguay. We were documenting mammal populations, camera traps mostly, but also night drives to spot animals. I'd been on the job maybe three months at that point. The heat was unbelievable that week, even for the Chaco. During the day you couldn't do much except stay in camp and drink water. All the real work happened after sunset when things cooled down a bit. I was driving one of the survey routes that night in our Land Rover, one of those old boxy ones from the eighties. Just me, a spotlight, and about forty kilometers of dirt track to cover. The route took you through scrubland and these patches of quebracho forest, real dense in places. Rovers are solid for that terrain - Kennedy' I'd done it maybe a dozen times before.
It was around eleven thirty when I first noticed something off. I was maybe twenty kilometers into the route, moving slow, scanning the trees with the spotlight. That's when I caught movement to my left, maybe thirty meters into the brush. At first I thought it was a group of giant anteaters. We'd been seeing them regularly that month, and they move in this distinctive way, you know, that shuffling walk they have. But these were upright. Completely upright, walking on two legs like people. I stopped the vehicle and killed the engine. Rolled down the window and listened. The Chaco at night is never really quiet, you've got insects, nightjars, the occasional howler monkey in the distance. But right then, in that immediate area, there was nothing. Complete silence. Like everything else had gone still.
I grabbed the spotlight and swept it back toward where I'd seen the movement. And there they were. Five of them, maybe six, standing at the edge of the tree line, maybe twenty-five meters away now. Closer than they'd been. They were tall. The largest one had to be close to two meters, standing completely erect. They had the snouts, the long tubular snouts of giant anteaters, and these small dark eyes. But the bodies were wrong. The proportions were all wrong. The torsos were thick and human-shaped, the arms hung at their sides with these long curved claws at the ends. The legs bent backward at the knee, like a person's legs, not an animal's. The fur was coarse, gray and black, banded across the shoulders and chest the way giant anteaters are marked. But these things were standing there, watching me, with an awareness that felt completely human. One of them tilted its head to the side, studying me the way you'd study something you're trying to figure out.
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