The Ferocious Chaz

Chaz is my neighbor.  He's a chameleon, and he lives somewhere near my house - in either the guava tree or orange tree behind my house, I would guess.  It doesn't matter where he lives exactly, only that he occasionally pops up when I stumble upon him.  And whenever I do see Chaz moving ever so slowly I have to stop and watch him.  Chameleons really are interesting: they move exceptionally slow, have oddly shaped feet / claw-type things, and do in fact change colors before your eyes.

I cut these bananas from a tree near my house and as soon as I opened the cluster up I saw Chaz.  He was just sitting there; exactly how he is in this photograph.

However, the most interesting thing, to me, about chameleons is how incredibly terrified Zambians are of them.  I once found a chameleon in a tree, deep in the forest, and showed my local Department of Fisheries Officer (who happened to be with me that day) my find and not only did he jump high off of the ground, but he ran to the nearest termite mound and refused to come back around until I put the chameleon somewhere high in a tree... where it couldn't bite him.

Look at his weird claw foot as it is grabbing the banana down to the left of him.  I assume it's a he, but it could be a she.  Who knows?

The next day I went to take my clothes off of the clothing line and there, sitting atop my boxers, was Chaz. 

That's right - where it couldn't bite him. You see, Zambians believe that the bite of a chameleon will bring "masham" (bad luck) at the least but death in the worst case scenario.  Some time last year my village headman told me a story about the bite of a chameleon and it went like this:

Outside the city of Ndola a woman was stopped by the police at a checkpoint.  The police asked her to get out of the car she was traveling in and to show them the contents of her bag.  She did this and upon opening the bag a chameleon clambered out.  It immediately bit the woman's hand.  She seized up and fell to the ground... dead.  Her body then turned all sorts of different colors from black to green to blue, red, back to green, and many other hues.  The chameleon crawled away and since then Zambians have been afraid of chameleons, or so my village headman claims.

He's not the most fleet of foot, so his slow motion movements gave me plenty of time to run inside my house, put my camera together, and get outside in time to get some pictures of him before he made his way into the guava tree.

When I asked my co-worker Chipo about chameleons she said, "Ah... I don't like them.  Not at all.  The way they walk, the way they change colors... and the skin... I don't like it.  Stay far from them."  She laughed when I told her the story my headman passed on to me, but it was more of an uncertain laugh, as if to say, "Yeah, that could be real.  It's possible."

Who knows when I'll be seeing Chaz next, but I'm sure in the meantime I'll hear more stories about the power of a chameleon's bite and their dubious nature.

As I don't believe in the power of a lowly chameleon's bite to induce harm and masham on my life I'll continue studying Chaz whenever he shows up next.  He's one of the more interesting looking neighbors I've ever had.