I have no concept of the day of the week here. Unlike the West, lives here are not dictated by daily routines with rigid time schedules. There is no such concept of "routine" in Africa. The opressive heat and the fact that most things don't work here prevent routine from occurring. If you have 5 tasks to accomplish in a day and you get one of them done...that's a helluva productive day. Most tasks devour at least half the day due to one or more of the following blunders: your ride falls through, something is broken which prevents access, the person you are going to meet is never around, the establishment you are visiting is closed due to some utility failure, its too hot, the product you are looking for is no longer available, the phone lines are down so nothing can be pre-arranged, etc. When you make plans to meet with people, its common to say "I'll be there in the morning". If someone says "meet me at 10am, the implication is give or take 90 minutes. We don’t have weekends off. Instead we get six days off per month which we can take at random or together. Every day feels like a Saturday night because the excitement of the unknown hangs around every corner.
This evening we got word that a snake was discovered behind a couch in someone’s house in the next village down the road. My housemate, Mothusi, is often requested to come capture and relocate snakes as he is the master snake wrangler of Mokolodi. These guys do it the old school way. They don’t have fancy Western tongs that most zookeepers use to handle snakes. All it takes here is a 6 foot tree branch with a forked end and balls of Titanium.
Southern Africa is particularly notorious for being home to some of the world’s most venomous snakes. 13 of the 36 species of snake found here are dangerous to humans. These aren’t your cute garden variety reptiles that Billy brings home from the playground to show mom. Some of the nastier ones will force you to use words like “helicopter” and “life insurance”. As a bush rookie, I quietly tip-toe around like Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits. Assassins armed with venomous fangs lurk in the undergrowth and pythons wrapped around tree branches are just waiting to give me the “Welcome to Africa, Honkey!” hug. For now, walking around here always has that edge of apprehension until I can shed my American skins to get the city out of me and put the bushman into me. One of the cardinal rules here at the reserve is to always walk in pairs in case something happens.
So an hour later, a brand new Range Rover pulls up and out pops an obese white rich South African man who is a retired banker. Mosthusi gets in the car with his stick, a glass cage, and protective eye goggles. I jump in the back seat without even asking the fat bastard if I can come along. After a short drive to his home, we enter through gates opened by remote control. It was a sprawling tacky show of status in the midst of a modest village of one room structures made of whatever material was available (corrugated tin, cinderblock,wood planks). All money and no taste. His arrogant wife should have thrown away some money at an interior designer rather than the 8th bedroom. The Jones family. Rather than keeping up with them, neighbors probably wanted to rob them. We made our way down an endless hallway and as I passed each room, I couldn’t help peering inside with the mind of a thief wondering what I could lift. The only thing I wanted was his air conditioning. Then quickly, the reality of the waiting snake snapped me out of my temporary burglar delusion. We entered the living room and saw its tail slither away into the void like a Jacob’s Ladder hallucination. Moments later we caught a full glimpse while it slipped into the storage closet. Mothusi rolled his eyes and shook his head.
“You are about to be introduced to the Mozambique Spitting Cobra, my naïve American friend.”
After my spinal fluid thawed and I was able to move again, I stepped back slowly and watched Mosthusi work his magic. We had to empty the entire contents of the closet to get an angle on the snake. Boxed banking documents of white collar crime came out one after the other. I wondered what scandals this guy had buried in here. His gold donkey rope chain gave him up for the crook he probably was. Either that or he’s been watching too many Too Short videos with his son. After 30 minutes of dodging & weaving, shuckin’ & jivin’, thriving & kniving…..he dropped the fork of the stick to immobilize its head. After a meditative exhale, he grabbed its head with his right hand, dropped the stick, and clutched its body with his left. He motioned to me to go open the cage and just as he was about to place it in, he dropped the snake right in front of us. The quick-thinking teller threw a towel over the snake before I had the opportunity to urinate. With two sticks, Mosthusi picked up the covered snake chopstick style and shanghai’d it into the cage. Immediately, its rose to its striking position with full hood displayed and began soaking the glass with projectile streams of pure venom. Only then did I fully appreciate the meaning of the goggles.
This is a fascinating beast. Definitely in the top 5 of the A.R.T.S (African Reptilian Terror Squad). To squirt their venom, these snakes put pressure on their venom glands to move the liquid through ducts down its hollow fangs and out the tips. They can spit up to 8 feet and if it hits your eyes, I’ve been told to flush it out with whatever liquid is available (water, soda, milk, beer, urine). Even when properly flushed, it takes 4 days for the victim’s eyes to recover from the severe inflammation. If unflushed, partial or total loss of vision is assured. Its venom is predominantly cytotoxic, causing serious local tissue damage. If bitten, the longer the delay in getting anti-venom serum, the more extensive the tissue loss may be and the more likely that skin grafts will be necessary.
After it was safely secured, the man invited us into the kitchen for a beverage. Mosthusi had a glass of juice. I asked for a scotch, clean. I settled for the local watery lager. {its difficult to see my cursor right now as there are no less than 20 bugs crawling all over the computer monitor}. As we were chatting, I noticed Mosthusi stealing glances at the granite countertops, stainless steel modern appliances, and slate flooring. Every time our host looked away, Mosthusi would look at me with an animated disbelief gesture. There was a conspicuous red button mounted on the wall and I asked what it was for. The man told me it is a dedicated phone line that connects directly to the Emergency Dept of the local hospital. One press and an ambulance arrives, presuming it has enough gasoline. Mosthusi & I looked at each other and silently agreed that this guy is a completely paranoid sap. Just then his dog entered the kitchen and raised both forepaws onto his owners lap. Apparently we were too late. Before we had arrived, the snake had sprayed the dog’s face. Its eye was swollen beyond recognition. You couldn’t see any white of the eyeball. It was grotesquely enveloped in a red swollen pussy mass. Evidently, his other dog had endured the same ordeal 4 years ago and the man still had the ointment to apply directly to its eyeball. The man then drove us home just before midnight. After two quick handshakes, I told the man anytime he ever needed help in the future...never call me.
Mosthusi & I sat and talked on our veranda.
“What is it about snakes that evokes a primal dread in humans”?, I asked.
“I’ll tell you in a year. I’m doing my final research project in college on the topic of whether the fear of snakes is innate or learned”.
“But fear is a natural instinct along with hunger & sex, isn’t it?.
“Yes, but you are not naturally afraid of lions or sharks until you learn what they are capable of doing to you”, he said.
I nodded silently.
“Michael, the trick to catching a lethal snake is to take a moment to calm your breathing before you go for its head. When your heart rate is pumping too fast, you are liable to make a mistake or have a moment of panic which could be fatal.”
After absorbing this, I mused inwardly that I’m going to learn a lot from this warrior.
I put my hand on his massive shoulder (I forgot to mention that Mosthusi is a chiseled specimen of dark chocolate muscle), smiled & nodded, then turned to walk back into our house.
“You & I are going to be good friends”, I muttered.
As I tried to fall asleep, I couldn’t shake the image of that poor dog’s eye from my dome. When wild & domestic lives cross paths, there is rarely a good outcome.
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