Slideshow ( 2 images )

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - A 66-year-old Brazilian man wrestled with a 15-foot (5-meter) anaconda for nearly half an hour to free his grandson from the snake’s crushing death grip, a newspaper reported Friday.

Matheus Pereira de Araujo, 8, would likely be dead inside the belly of the 80 pound (35 kg) anaconda if his grandfather had not heard his screams for help, zoologists said.

Anacondas, the biggest snakes in the world, are nonvenomous and kill prey by asphyxiation.

Araujo was playing with friends near a creek on his grandfather’s farm in Cosmorama, 310 miles west of Sao Paulo, Wednesday when the snake attacked him.

“It was very fast. I didn’t have time to do anything,” the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper quoted Araujo as saying by. “My grandfather is a hero -- I was so afraid of dying.”

Joaquim Pereira was driving home when he heard his grandson screaming. He jumped into the ravine and grappled with the snake, which started coiling around him as well.

Pereira attacked it with stones and a machete and killed it.

“It was the most terrible scene that I’ve seen in my life,” Pereira said. “It was totally coiled around him while he was screaming that he was dying.”