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It is just a coati. A little animal, no bigger than a small dog. Just about the least dangerous thing could run into on your walk.

You squirm, trying to find leverage to escape. The "least dangerous thing" is wrapped around you like a second skin. The inside of its stomach is too slippery to get a grip and the little animal's gastric juices sting you all over. It is so much smaller than its meal that all they do is tickle. For now, anyway.

You remember how you got into this situation. Spring break. Your first year of college led inevitably to this trip. Your parents paid for it, of course. They've always spoiled you and you weren't going to complain when that led to a spring break in Costa Rica.

They are going to write it off on their taxes as a religious pilgrimage. Tomorrow morning you meet with some missionaries and you'll spend the days at the local equivalent of a soup kitchen.

But the evenings are your own. You have a few drinks with fellow college students also there for spring break, and watch them pair off. Maybe you'll find someone to share your bed too. Before that, you decide to go for a walk.

"Don't go into the jungle alone," the owner of the bed and breakfast told you when you arrived. But he also said the trails are well marked. How much trouble can you get into on a twenty minute walk, anyway?

Quite a lot, it turns out. The rainforest is full of sounds. Birds and insects and the distant grunts of who-knows-what, all mixing in with the sound of the sea half a mile away.

Movement ahead, a group of small animals. You recognize them by their long ringed tails. Coatis looks like a raccoon that someone grabbed from each end and stretched. At the back end is that tail and at the front a narrow flexible muzzle.

The coatis are rooting around for bugs, worms, whatever they eat. The biggest one stands up as you approach and makes a whuffling sound. The alarm nose makes them scurry off into the undergrowth. Only the largest one stays, sitting up on its haunches to look at you.

It stays where it is as you walk up. Maybe it's someone's pet on a walk just like yours. It certainly seems tame and it's a lot bigger than the others. You reach out and it lets you pet it.

You smile and pick it up, holding it beneath its forelegs. It is heavier than it looks but still only about a quarter your size.

"Do not feed or handle the wildlife." The bed and breakfast owner said that, too. Now you learn why.

The coati seems to smile back at you even as its ringed tail whips forward. The tail seems a lot longer suddenly, long enough to wrap a couple of times around you and pin your arms to your sides. You let go of the coati and it grabs you in turn, its little forepaws gripping your shirt on either side of your neck.

"Hey!" Its grippy little forepaws hold you tight and its hindpaws grab your clothes farther down. You stagger backward, off the trail and into the brush, but it ignores the branches bumping into it and leans forward.

Its tail is much stronger than you expected. Not strong enough to squeeze you to death, but you can't wriggle loose. You sit down suddenly as you trip over a root and when you recover you're nose to nose with the little beast. And then it yawns.

You watch the long muzzle hinge up, the equally long lower jaw go down, and marvel as it opens its mouth far wider than you'd have thought possible. A fold of skin on each side stretches, joints creak and pop, and before it occurs to you that you are actually in danger your face is in its mouth.

You blink, staring past its hind teeth into the purple chute of gullet. Sharp fangs scrape your chin and forehead and you wince, but the little animal is so obviously not a threat that you don't think to scream for help until it is too late. It rocks its upper jaw forward and folds of flesh slide by as your face slips into its throat.

Astonished, you still don't react as you feel the massive bulge swell out of its neckfur. It just swallowed your head! That's half the size of its whole body! Slime coating its gullet gums your eyes shut and everything goes dim and pink.

With only a few small scratches from its canine fangs and with your reactions dulled by a few drinks you just smile and giggle as you feel it tense. The ambitious little beast swallows with all its might and the grip and pull of its throat eases you a little deeper. You laugh and relax, waiting for it to give up and disgorge you.

But it doesn't. With all four paws and its strong tail holding you fast the coati swallows your head and neck, pushes its cheeks against your upper body and begins to twist its muzzle from side to side. With the first spark of real alarm you feel its cheek pop over your shoulder on one side, then the other. Its tail tenses and relaxes as it moves down your body, freeing your upper arms but pinning them to your body further down.

Methodically, with a snakelike wriggle of its jaws, it engulfs your upper arms too. Lubricated by throat slime for easy swallowing, your face pushes past a muscular valve into its stomach. The reason for the movements of its tail becomes evident. It moves to make room for the jaws to advance. Its friendly attitude was to convince you to come close enough to attack and now bit by bit it is working its jaws over its prey.

The fact that an animal no bigger than your leg is trying to swallow you whole suddenly seems a lot less humorous. Its narrow body swells unnaturally as your shoulders slide down its throat. Stomach acids sting your face and it occurs to you that you might suffocate in here before it gives up and spits you out. Acid isn't the only problem.

It all seemed like a joke and you let it get this far without fighting. You could have pulled it off you if you'd reacted when it first yawned, but you didn't. Only now do you start to struggle. And almost immediately you know its too late. The little beast is over you to the hips, its jaws trapping your arms to your sides, and its tail has moved down to wind around your legs. Its body creaks and bulges, reduced to a thinly stretched fur coat that is slowly pulled over a meal four times its size.

All you can do is kick helplessly as the little coati finishes its meal. When your hips are gone into its gullet the grip of its jaws and throat sends you sliding deeper, easing its efforts to swallow you. For a time your lower legs hang out, but with a huge effort the swollen coati manages to roll forward, trapping the soles of your feet against the forest floor. Unable to bend your knees, which are locked straight by its throat, its own weight pushes your calves in after.

There comes a time when your feet are in its mouth. Curled up inside the stretched bag of fur, you manage only a faint wriggle of protest as its jaws close. With a last effort the coati swallows, strains, swallows again, and finally relaxes.

This is ridiculous! Little limbs and a pointed muzzle on a humorously undersized face protrude from a mass of brown fur stretched over you like spandex. An animal a quarter your size gulped you down and now it lies there in the undergrowth. The vast swell of its swollen body completely incapacitates it.

But inside that thinly stretched fur is the slick lining of the coati's stomach, wrapped around you just as tightly. That lining is coated with stomach acids and more of it trickles in by the moment. So far it is just a tickle, but unless you get out, the process of digestion will begin. It may take days or weeks, but it is not like the coati needs to go anywhere. It need merely lie there as bit by bit you are broken down by its gastric juices. The greedy little animal has its meal. Now it can just lie here and digest it.

You try to wriggle, try to kick, but the thick layer of slime coating the walls of its stomach make it impossible to get any leverage. If you could gather enough strength you could force your way out of its gullet and escape, as though you were pulling off a skin-tight shirt. But the slime is everywhere. You can't even push against yourself to gain leverage as your skin and clothing is as slippery as the walls.

Just the same, you squirm. The coati lets out a long, uncomfortable sounding belch and twitches where it lies. Little fore- and hindpaws wrap as far as they can over the massive bulge, trying to hold its meal still, and despite your best effort you stay right where you are. With no way to call for help - phones don't work worth a damn here, you left yours in your room - you feel it relax as it recovers from the effort of gulping you down. Your struggle just makes the swollen beast twitch where it lies. The great bulge of swallowed human changes shape as you wriggle, but that doesn't get you out.

It burps again and you wonder if anyone will realize what happened to you. Maybe someone will find the beast, stretched like elastic over an obvious human meal, and recover your partially digested body. Maybe they won't but someone will happen upon your clothes and wallet, maybe even your bones, retched up by the greedy beast after its stomach juices dissolve your flesh. Then at least your family will know what happened. As opposed to being told "The jungle is a big place. His body may never be found."

The sting of its stomach juices is getting genuinely painful. It will take it ages to digest you but that process had begun. Unless something happens very soon, you won't get out of the little animal the same way you got in. Eventually it will digest and pass enough of you to waddle away, thick with fat from its unnaturally ambitious meal. By then there simply won't be a body for anyone to find and no one will ever know that you heard a coati belch from inside the coati.

As the stomach squeezes in tight and you breathe the last sips of air it hasn't burped up, it occurs to you that something besides a human might find it. Helplessly gorged, an anaconda or jaguar would find it a ready-made meal.

Not that it'll be a big help as far as you are concerned. It it not a question of whether you'll be digested now. It's merely a question of by what.