What I learned

A few aid workers and I were in a seventeen-passenger bus. We were in Kenya, traveling on a dirt road through the Tsavo Wildlife Sanctuary. Suddenly, the driver stopped, put the car in reverse, and backed up.

“What happened?” we asked.

“There’s a cobra on the road,” he said.

We gathered at the front of the bus and peered through the windshield. Sure enough, there was a huge snake lying in the middle of the road, completely still. We waited for it to move away, or maybe raise up, flatten its hood, and hiss at us like in the movies, but nothing happened.

We got out and formed a large circle around him.

As the minutes passed and our curiosity grew, the circle slowly began to shrink. Soon we were standing in a ring no more than six feet from one of the most dangerous snakes in the world.

“Do you think it’s dead?” someone asked.

“Of course it’s dead,” I said. “If it were alive, it wouldn’t just be lying there.”

I had a razor-sharp Gerber screw-action knife on my belt. I pulled it out and opened it with one hand. The knife made a satisfying click as the blade locked into place.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m going to cut his head off and skin him.”

Everyone in the circle took a step back.

I must say that I was somewhat misinformed about cobra behavior. When threatened or angry, they do rear up and give a warning. However, when frightened, their response is quite drastically different from that of the Hollywood cobras. Timothy Corfield in his book The Wilderness Guardian writes, “Treat all snakes as venomous, and even if they appear dead, consider them alive. Many species, especially cobras, feign death when disturbed.”

In the medical section of his book, Corfield writes that in the case of a penetrating bite from a large cobra, if more than three or four hours have passed since the administration of the serum, “failure to act means almost certain death.”

The tourniquet should be placed five or six inches above the bite and the wound cut open. Corfield says not to waste time sterilizing the blade, because the seconds saved could be the difference between life and death.

I picked up a stick, walked up to the cobra, put the stick on its neck, and put my foot on it. Then I bent down with the knife.

The fact that I am writing this can only be attributed to one thing: the cobra had the good sense to actually be dead. We had no idea how it died. I cut off its head and used a stick to throw the head into the bushes by the roadside. I skinned it, planning to give it to someone who would know how to preserve it.

It wasn’t until later that I read Corfield’s book that I added the cobra incident to the list of stupid things I’ve done. It’s still in the top five.

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