By Terry Wieland
But what about snakes?
What about them?
It’s been a while since I wrote anything about snakes and, to be honest, I haven’t missed it. Writing about snakes requires thinking about snakes and not being a snake guy, my mind prefers to dwell upon such burning questions as “Is a Mauser 98 better than a pre-64?” and “Rigby double, or Westley Richards?” Hmmm.
But, the other day, the question came up yet again when, talking about Africa, my interlocutor fixed me with that familiar anxious look and asked, “But what about snakes?”
Snakes? What snakes? We were talking about living in a tent versus a house with walls and a door, and how sleeping in the open, under the stars, is preferable even to a tent. No snakes involved.
“I thought there were always snakes,” she said. “How do you keep them out of the tents?”
That’s a hard question to answer because it presumes that snakes are always trying to get into tents, surrounding them in the night, slithering about, probing for openings. Such is not, in my experience anyway, the case.
But it brought to mind a tale I read when I was a child, about an expedition somewhere in South America. The members had been together a long time, were thoroughly sick of one another and barely speaking. As a result, they neglected basic camp chores like clearing all the grass away around the campfire— a measure to deter rodents and, hence, snakes. During the night, a snake came through the grass, slithered into a sleeping bag, and curled up on the stomach of the sleeping man.
To cut a rather frightening story short, he remained motionless and terrified throughout the night, and they were only able to persuade the snake to leave quietly the next day by taking away all shade and leaving man, sleeping bag, and serpent to slowly roast through the heat of the day. Finally, hot and annoyed, the snake slithered out past his head—it was a bushmaster, and truly deadly—and was hacked to death with machetes.
That is one of the two childhood experiences to which I can trace my herpetophobia. Reading that story, in the Reader’s Digest, when I was seven or eight, came after my first encounter with a snake wherein, around the age of five, I was walking down a trail and stepped on a garter snake under some leaves. It writhed up around my ankle, I ran home screaming, and that was that: Herpetophobe to this day.
Well, maybe not quite a ‘phobe’. In the interests of journalistic accuracy, I looked up the definition and find that I’m on the cusp between actual phobia and mere fear and dislike. I don’t like looking at photos of snakes, but I don’t break out in a cold sweat, have a panic attack, and refuse to leave the house for a week.
Given that attitude, though, you would think snakes would have been uppermost in my mind when I first thought of going to Africa, but they never were. It may be because none of the African writers who dominated my teenage years—Robert Ruark especially, but also John Taylor and Stuart Cloete—dwelt on snakes at any length. (It was years later that I read Cloete’s novel, Mamba. Thank the Lord.)
Uganda is not what you would call a snake paradise, but it has enough of them. Mambas, cobras, that kind of thing. Pythons. But it was three months after I first set foot on the tarmac at Entebbe Airport that I encountered my first snake, and that was in a guerrilla camp in the southern Sudan. It was a green mamba, and it was dangling from a branch above a waterhole where we were having our first bath in a week. It was, I suspect, just curious, because it turned and climbed back into the foliage, leaving us to lather and rinse. The Anyanya with the Lee-Enfield just grinned and shrugged.
That was in 1971. I didn’t encounter my next African snake until 1990, and that was after two more trips to Africa that had taken me to Kenya, Uganda again, South Africa, South-West Africa (now Namibia), and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). In 1990, in Tanzania, we were driving along a mountain track on the edge of the Rift, came around a bend, and there was a python curled up in the rocks. We stopped and looked. It raised its head and gave us that cool python stare. We stared back, then decided it was up to us to move along, so we did. I can’t say I shrugged, but at least I didn’t leap in the back and cover my head with a blanket or reach for the .450.
I’ve written this before, but if you are snake-sensitive, it’s a good idea to find out how your professional hunter feels about reptiles before you sign the cheque. Most are indifferent, feeling about snakes the way most of us feel about poison ivy—best avoided but not life-threatening. Others, however, mercifully rare, actually like snakes—like them—and want to introduce the rest of us to the joy of communing with serpents.
One such is Chris Dandridge, son of Darryl Dandridge, who was a noted snake admirer. One time, reportedly, Darryl bet that he could stay in a large cage full of venomous snakes, naked, for a week. He did and survived. Or so I’m told. Chris grew up with snakes. We were wending our way north into Kwando one time, looking for a campsite. No tents, sleeping under the stars, but this was something I’d grown to enjoy, memories of the bushmaster and the sleeping bag notwithstanding.
There was a clearing with a big old tree at the edge, which had a cavernous hole near the base.
“Better not here,” Chris said. “There’s a black mamba that lives in that tree.”
A PH who knows the home address of a mamba? At least he didn’t suggest we stop in for tea.
For various reasons, mambas seem to grip the imagination of African visitors more than any other snake. Undoubtedly, they are dangerous. According to the charts, their venom is right up there, they have the longest fangs and can inject the most venom, they can climb trees like a monkey and are so fast they can overtake a running horse. Or so I’ve read. Other accounts dispute the speed, and some insist they are not as aggressive as their reputation would have us believe.
My feeling is that if they are only half as fast, half as deadly, and as laid back as a hippie on weed, I’d still rather avoid them.
I have one black mamba story that various witnesses swear is true. In the early 90s, the editor of Outdoor Life, a noted herpetophobe, was on safari in the Okavango. He woke up in the night to the sound of scurrying, but it stopped, and he thought nothing more of it. They went out hunting the next morning and returned to camp around noon. He went into his tent and out the back into the attached lavatory. There, coming in through the shower’s drain, was a black mamba.
Our hero went screaming out the front, the mamba continued on into the shower—he had no choice— then turned and slithered out the way he’d come. The PH gathered some folks and beat through the bush behind, flushed the mamba, and killed it.
They pieced it together afterwards and concluded the mamba had been in the tent the night before and caught the scurrying mouse, pursuing it under the bed, up onto the chair, and so on. Our man packed his bag and was at the airport in Maun by nightfall.
That story went the rounds of hunting and shooting writers for years thereafter, and while we all laughed, we all secretly wondered what we would have done under the same circumstances. I can guarantee you, for a few nights at least, I would not have slept well.
