This is another that's taken from a 16th Century Spanish account. In what is now Venezuela, the Spaniards had the Pozos, known cannibals, guiding them as they approached a then-unknown tribe, the Paucaras. The results are dramatized below; the opening is almost paragraph or two is taken almost verbatim from the Spanish account. The Paucaras for quite a while had a supernatural dread of the Spaniards, preferring death to confronting them.
We weren't far from the Paucara village when we encountered the four young women. At first, we didn't know there were four; we only saw one, and at the time, we thought she was the freshest and prettiest Indian girl we'd seen in all the provinces. She looked to be in her mid-teens; her face was broad, her eyes huge, her hair long and thick. She was completely naked, and we stood staring for a moment at her high young breasts, her slim thighs, her flat stomach, her satiny bronze skin. But she saw us too, and, with a shriek of pure terror, she started running off to her left - toward the Pozo warriors, who were just then coming out of the brush to meet her.
Evidently, she must have decided then and there that death at the hands of her tribe's traditional enemies was better than an encounter with us. On seeing the Pozos she slowed her run to a walk, then knelt down in the path before them, her arms folded under her breasts, her head down. Unhurriedly, the Pozos walked up to her; she remained, waiting for them. All the warriors except two passed her by, but these two stayed, one standing in front of her and one behind.
Then, without the slightest warning, the Pozo standing in front of her struck her head sharply with the blunt side of his ax. She fell forward, blood running in her thick black hair; tossing his ax down, her assailant reached for her, while the other man did the same. Together, they pulled her back up to a kneeling position by her arms; she was not dead, nor was she unconscious, she was just dazed.
She raised her head, looked up at her captors, and the man behind her grabbed her hair, savagely yanking her head back. Her eyes remained fixed on the man in front of her, and she struggled only the tiniest bit as the man behind brought his knife around and laid it against her tight throat.
The blade was not sharp; the first time he slid it across it produced only a superficial scratch. Starting again, he pressed down harder with the knife; she gagged and closed her eyes as it began biting in. A ragged gash opened in her slender neck, and her blood started to run out; his next cut took the blade deeply in, and now jets of blood began squirting out. Her arms and legs were jerking violently, and her head quivered, but she did not struggle with her assailants; each time he stopped she became still, waiting quietly for him to cut her again, and she never had to wait very long. Repeatedly he put the blade back into the incision he'd made and pulled it through again, and each time more of her blood came gushing out. She was still alive when the knife grated against the bones of her neck; her eyes were blinking rapidly and her chest was bouncing as air whistled and bubbled around her severed windpipe. But even so, she kept her arms folded across her midsection the whole time.
The Pozo warrior kept hacking and chopping at her neck until he'd decapitated her. Tossing her severed head aside, he and the other man took turns thrusting their faces into the thick stream of blood spouting from her neck, drinking it avidly. As soon as the flow had subsided, they threw the still-twitching body down and split it open with their knives, ripping her heart and liver out and eating them on the spot.
At about the time they'd finished their feast, the other Pozos returned with three more women in tow. These were teenagers too, and they were all as naked as the first girl; all three were attractive as well. The girls were quite utterly unresisting as the men tied two of them; the third just watched. Though no one was holding her, she made no effort to escape.
Then the Pozos turned their attention to her. She was another very pretty girl, perhaps about fifteen or sixteen years old, her body a little slimmer than the girl whose headless corpse was lying in plain sight nearby. When the second girl glanced at it, her face showed no sign of any fear, but when she looked at our white and bearded faces she seemed terrified. She turned her eyes back to a Pozo warrior who was now standing in front of her; he was holding a knife in his hand, and she looked down at it for a moment, but even so she shrank closer to him, as if looking to him for protection against us.
Even when his knife touched her body, just under her ribs on the right, she still moved closer to him, pressing her body against the hard point.
He pushed on the knife too; after a moment it broke through her smooth coppery skin and started sinking into her body, but even so she kept pressing herself against him, accepting his blade in a fearful silence. Blood started streaming down her flat stomach; the knife kept slipping in, deeper and deeper. She wasn't unaware of it; she frowned and twitched periodically, and she even glanced down at it once or twice, watching it as it sank into her. That didn't seem to deter her; she still pressed hard against him.
When the full length of the blade was buried, the Pozo warrior turned her so that she was facing us and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. With the knife still buried in her abdomen he paused a moment' then he started dragging it downward, using a little sawing motion to slice her belly open.
Blood and fluids gushed out, and she began to react a little more normally; her face contorted and she doubled over the knife a little. The Pozo warrior kept right on cutting her, even when she began to choke and vomit, bringing up bloody pieces of her insides. When he reached the upper edge of her pubic hair, he pulled the knife out and immediately pushed his hand inside her abdomen. Grabbing a handful of her entrails, he roughly tore them free and handed them to one of the other men, who laid most of them in a pile on the grass before starting to eat pieces of them raw.
The girl was losing her strength; she leaned heavily against the Pozo as blood streamed from her mutilated abdomen. By now it had completely coated her legs, and they gleamed with red wetness. Holding her under her arms, the Pozo kept digging around inside of her, pulling out bloody chunks of her entrails and handing them to his fellows. The girl's knees went limp, and the warrior let her slide down toward the ground, catching her hair as she went. Finally he was supporting her by it; he pushed his knife against her neck, just under her ear, and with a sudden quick movement, punched it into her. As far gone as she already was, her body jerked, and her hands came up weakly toward her neck; but she was not able to resist as the Pozo methodically opened her throat, then severed her head. The body fell, twitching violently in the dust, a thick stream of blood pouring from the stump of her neck; then, after many seconds, it became still.
For awhile, all was calm as the Pozos butchered the two bodies and ate the remainder of their meal in leisure fashion. Then we were again on our way, the remaining two captives at the ends of ropes, being towed along. These two were weeping and pleading, but from the snatches of their speech we could understand, they were not begging for their lives; their only concern was to be kept away from us. Why they were so afraid of us, we did not know.
Early that evening, they were brought to the campfire circle. At that point, neither were tied or in any way restrained; one seated herself among the warriors while the other, a girl just a bit older than the other three - perhaps about eighteen - but just as attractive, was led to the center of the circle. While she waited passively, the Pozos drove four stakes into the ground, after which they stretched her out, tying her wrists and ankles to them so that she was spread-eagled. Then they took turns raping her, some in her mouth, some in her vagina. Staking her out, it seemed, had been quite unnecessary; she neither resisted nor protested their attentions. Far from it; whenever one of them thrust his penis into her mouth she worked it expertly with her tongue and lips, continuing until the man had ejaculated. Her hips were usually moving actively as well, thrusting up against whatever man happened to have stationed himself between her legs.
But, even though she seemed tireless at first, the Pozo warriors just kept coming, and finally she remained limp while they continued to satisfy themselves with her body. She wasn't unconscious, though. Sometimes she glanced fearfully over in our direction, as if terrified that we might be invited to join in the festivities.
She showed no such terror when two of the Pozos approached her with knives in their hands. While they waited, a couple of other warriors freed her from the stakes; she cooperated with them as they led her to a pole that had been planted in front of the campfire, and, still cooperating, held out her hands to be retied. Once this was done, they threw the free end of the rope up over the pole where it fell into a deep notch that had been cut there, and hoisted her into the air by her wrists. She looked a little uncomfortable, but made no protest as they tied the rope off, leaving her dangling with her feet perhaps ten inches off the ground. Then they pulled her ankles back and tied them together, behind the pole.
The two men with the knives took up positions on either side of her, and one of them ran his left hand down from her shoulder to her knee and grinned approvingly. She merely watched them; if she had any objections to whatever they might be planning to do to her with their knives, she gave no indication of them whatever, either by voice, movement, or expression.
They focused their attention first on her pert and shapely breasts; each one, after being handed a cup by one of his fellows, pierced one of her breasts with his knife, sliding his blade in perhaps two or three inches. The girl's body jerked and she grimaced as the blades entered her, but still she made no sound at all.
They did not remove the blades. Instead, they pulled them carefully upwards, opening the wounds a little; the cups were then held under her breasts, and her blood was allowed to flow down into them.
As each cup filled it was removed and passed around; the Pozos drank it like it was wine. Another cup then took its place, and they continued to drain her blood into them, pushing the knives deeper into her breasts or working them around whenever the flow seemed to be lessening. The girl said nothing and did not cry out; she spent most of her time staring up at the stars, though occasionally she glanced down at her chest, at the knives buried in her breasts. She showed no sign of the pain she had to be experiencing; indeed, she did not even seem to be particularly uncomfortable.
For a long while they went on taking blood from her breasts, the wounds growing larger and larger as the flow lessened and the knives were worked around inside to get it going again. At last, when it was taking several minutes to fill the cups, they stopped, withdrew their knives. They let her rest for several minutes; her lips were already quite pale, and though there was a large and ragged wound in each of her breasts, very little new blood flowed from them.
But she was not dead, and she was not unaware of it when one of the Pozos approached her bearing a lance with a sharp narrow head over a foot long. She raised her head a trifle, looked down at this man as he stood directly in front of her.
He in turn looked up at her face briefly. Then, holding the lance a foot or so behind the vicious-looking head, he rather gently insinuated the tip of it between the lightly-haired lips of her vagina. Their eyes met again; then she put her head back against the stake and stared up at the stars once more.
And he began pushing on the lance, sliding the sharp-edged blade up inside her.
A couple of inches of it disappeared before the blood started to flow. When it did, another warrior joined the first, using the cups again to collect it, passing them around again. The first one kept right on pushing on the lance, and the girl went utterly rigid, her eyes wide and her nostrils flared. She seemed determined to endure whatever they chose to do to her, though; she still refused to scream, refused to make any sound whatever beyond a few involuntary gasps and grunts. And the Pozo warrior kept pushing the lance in, deeper and deeper.
The rear edges of the blade disappeared into her vagina; her blood was now a flowing river streaming down the inside of her thighs, and her lips grew paler than ever. Even so, she remained alive and conscious, and the lance continued, inexorably, to glide up into her. Now that the blade was fully inside the wooden shaft began following it, and even more of her blood came running out to be collected in the cups.
There was an audible tearing sound, and after that we could see her abdomen move slightly as the lance head now passed into it. She choked, gagged, and began vomiting blood. The Pozo warrior shoved another foot of the lance inside her, there was another ripping noise, and then the girl began fighting frantically for breath. Her body started jerking violently, her eyes rolling back in her head, her outstretched fingers flexing and relaxing. The Pozo pressed on, more quickly now, and after a second or two her throat swelled visibly. Her trembling body went utterly rigid, her hands and feet vibrating; she maintained it for a second, then relaxed abruptly.
As her eyes glazed over, the Pozos took her down from the stake; then, with a series of expert hacks, one of them severed her head. Another, equally skilled with his knife, disembowled her. Once this was done, the lance was pushed on through, so that the blade completely cleared the stump of her neck; the corpse was then skinned and immediately placed over a cooking-fire. As always, much of the entrails were eaten raw.
The remaining girl, though she'd watched the entire process, did not seem to be in any way distressed or upset, or in any sense concerned about her own fate. She did not partake of her late companion's cooked flesh or of her blood, but she showed no revulsion when the Pozos sitting beside her ate the meat avidly, nor had she seemed bothered by their drinking of the other girl's blood. Indeed, she was often smiling, sometimes passing a few words of conversation with her captors. She made no objections when they touched her naked body, and she made no attempt whatever to escape, even though she was not tied and she was sometimes left sitting quite alone.
It seemed to us that perhaps her casual attitude meant that she knew she herself was not to be killed and eaten like the others. Though the other three had been attractive, this one exceeded them easily; she was perhaps fourteen, slender and graceful as a cat, with perfect copper skin and an immense mane of silken black hair falling over a long and slim neck. Her legs were muscular and perfect, her breasts smallish but high and firm, her nipples pert and seemingly always erect. Like all the Paucaras, her eyes were very large, her nose small, her lips full but not excessive.
But we were not sure. The other girls had gone unresisting to painful deaths; for reasons we could not fathom, they even seemed to welcome them.
When the evening began to grow late and the corpse of the third girl had been reduced to a pile of well-picked bones, it seemed that we were going to get our answer, and that we were right. One of the Pozos went over to the girl, passed a few words with her; she smiled up at him, shrugged her shoulders, and nodded.
A few seconds later one of the Pozos began playing a driving rhythm on a drum; the girl got to her feet, moved out into the center of the camp circle, and started to dance.
Any gracefulness she'd shown before was instantly dwarfed by her performance. Always perfectly in time, she danced a slow sensuous ring around the fire, her bronze velvet skin gleaming with sweat. We watched her glide across in front of us, turn, bend and spread her knees as the drummer accented a particular stroke. Her hands were in her her hair, hurling it around her head, or up under her delicate breasts, bringing her nipples to an even sharper erection.
Then, as she passed around in front of us again, one of the Pozo warriors tossed a slender-bladed knife out toward her. It fell in the dirt, nearly at her feet, and she swept down to pick it up without missing a beat. Holding it casually, she made one more circle before stopping and posing prettily in front of one of the Pozo chieftains.
Smiling, she cocked one knee; the drummer interrupted his rhythm, struck his drum hard. She raised the knife, waited. There was another sharp strike, and she lifted her left hand high, while with her right she turned the knife around and brought it down so that the point was touching her abdomen near her waistline, a little to the right of the center line.
After a brief pause, the drummer pounded on his instrument once again, and she pierced herself with it.
It wasn't deep yet, but the drummer struck yet again and she unhesitatingly pushed it on in. Then the rhythm started again, and she stood swaying for a moment, the knife buried in her body, her blood just beginning to force its way out. Though she'd stabbed herself deeply, the blade was too slim to cause her immediate death.
After a brief pause, she slowly pulled it out; a rush of blood followed, but, ignoring it, she began her dance again, although it was much less energetic now. Her face a mask of determination, she completed another circle around the central fire, coming back at last to stand in front of another of the Pozo headmen. As before, she posed seductively, even though a broad red band was streaked down across her abdomen and her right leg. He leaned forward and, bending down, licked the blood from her belly; after a moment he fastened his mouth to the wound and sucked hard. She threw her head back and allowed him to do as he pleased. Finally, wiping his mouth, he waved her back; she posed again, and again turned her knife inwards toward her own body. This time she pressed the point of the blade against her right breast, just at the inner margin of her pert nipple.
The drummer hit another hard beat; all eyes were on her, everyone watching expectantly. Dutifully, her face tight, she clamped down hard on the weapon, and an inch or so of the blade sank into her breast. The drummer signaled again, and, after a barely-noticeable hesitation, she drove the blade on in deep. Her head went back again and her eyelids fluttered as it slipped into her chest, but she managed to remain on her feet, and she managed to keep pushing on it until it was all the way in.
Then, swaying again, she relaxed her grip and allowed her breast to resume its normal shape. As the drummer resumed his playing, she pulled it out of herself once more, and another river of blood started flowing down across her body.
A third time, she started around the circle. She was not dancing now; she was walking, and her steps were weak, uncertain. Even so, she raised both hands high over her head, the knife gripped between trembling fingers, and somehow found the strength to keep herself moving.
Again, she completed her circle; again, she posed before the Pozo chieftans. Another of the headmen motioned to her, she stepped forward, and he, tipping his head down, sucked fresh blood from her breast. As before, she waited patiently; when he'd drunk his fill she stepped back again. Once more she turned the knife toward herself, but this time the chiefs signaled her away; no drumbeat was struck. Again, and again with the knife above her head, she started moving around the fire.
As she started past the Pozo warriors, one stood; his spear snaked out, pierced the side of her chest shallowly. She gasped, but she kept going. Another met her, used his knife to gash her upper thigh. A third jumped up, stuck his lance into the side of her left breast, and a fourth ripped her calf with his knife. Each of these minor wounds staggered her, but she kept on; another man stuck an inch of his spearpoint into her belly, the next buried his deeply in one of her high firm buttocks, and the man after him cut her inner thigh severely with his knife. She moved on nevertheless, leaving an ever-increasing trail of blood on the dusty earth. Another warrior stood, stopped her with one arm, and plunged his knife a little ways into her armpit.
By the time she'd gotten a little more than halfway around the circle, her breasts showed five or six punctures each and her belly had been pierced at least ten times; there were numerous small wounds in her sides, from the crest of her hips to her armpits. Her buttocks were bleeding freely, and her back was both pierced and cut; except for her face and neck, there was almost no part of her that was not bleeding. Her body shone bright red in the firelight.
Another Pozo rose, stood in front of her holding his spear horizontally; she merely glanced at him and kept walking. As she came a little closer, he jabbed it forward, striking her near her navel and piercing her yet again; he did not immediately pull it out. She stared at him for a moment, then pushed onward another step, forcing the blade of the lance a little deeper into herself. With a laugh, the warrior snatched it out, but the girl staggered, swayed, and fell to her knees.
The Pozos watched in interested silence as she knelt for a few minutes, her chest heaving, her blood dripping. After one abortive effort, she forced herself back to her feet and stumbled onwards, evidently trying to make the complete circle, back around to where the headmen were seated. The Pozo warriors still got up to greet her as she passed, but they contented themselves now with inflicting light cuts on her thighs and arms.
Though she had to struggle, she made it, and she succeeded in posing in front of the headmen again. Two of the elder warriors stood up, each taking up a position beside her; she raised her arms high into the air, gripping her knife tightly with both hands. The drummer's rhythm again ceased, and this time, when he struck his drum violently, they simultaneously pierced the girl between the ribs with their spears, one on either side of her. They did not drive them deep, and when the drummer struck another blow, she somehow found the strength to stab her knife into herself again, back into her belly. The drummer struck another blow, she buried the knife; on the next, the spearmen drove their lances deep, skewering her from either side.
As they braced themselves to support her, her hands dropped away from the knife, leaving it buried in her body. She was trembling and coughing up blood, but almost immediately, two more warriors ran up to her and speared her, one driving his lance into her lower abdomen and the other piercing her back. Her knees buckled, but the spearmen would not let her fall, and more of the Pozos gather around, sinking their spears deeply into her breasts, her belly, her back, her buttocks, her thighs. With each new wound her body jerked and her mouth opened slightly, but she refused to cry out - or perhaps it was no longer possible.
Even so, she was not dead, and she was not unaware of what was happening to her. At the end, one of the chieftains rose from his place; standing close to her, he reached out his spear toward her. Taking it weakly in her hand, she guided its point until it was tucked up under her chin.
The chieftain pushed then, slowly but forcefully. Her head was pushed back; her eyes became huge as the point cut into her throat and jaw. He kept pushing, and finally there was a crunch as the blade passed up through the base of her skull. Her body jerked and twitched wildly on the spears impaling it while new blood flooded out down her chest, coursing over the layer already there. But, after a few seconds she became still, and the only sound was the dripping of the blood and of urine from a bladder relaxed in death.