The Spitting Cobra and the Devil

We were traveling in two land cruisers. On this particular day I was in Ben’s. The other land cruiser had stopped on the road ahead of us. Everyone was looking down at the ground. As we drove up next to them, I tried to focus on what they were seeing. When I did, I snapped back in my seat. It was as if the snake they had spotted were in the car with us. A long, thick blue-black spitting cobra lay motionless on the verge.

The spitting cobra is a deadly snake whose venom paralyzes your nervous system in less than a minute. Your brain can't send its signals to your lungs. Your lungs stop bellowing. You suffocate to death.

I remembered a story a guide had told me on an earlier safari. He had been driving along a road outside of Maun in Bostswana doing about 40 miles an hour. The window of his land cruiser was open and he was resting his elbow on the edge. He was wearing a short sleeve shirt. Suddenly, his arm felt cool as if it had been sprayed with water. He looked in the rear view mirror. A spitting cobra, raised up with its hood spread, was disappearing into the distance. He jammed on the brakes, ran to the back of the cruiser where he kept his waterbag and thrust his arm inside, frantically rubbing the spot where the venom had struck. He told the story with a great deal of admiration for the snake and not much concern for his own life. He had less than a minute to size up the situation and take action. Suppose he hadn't seen the snake in the mirror?

“Can you imagine the accuracy of that reptile, hitting a target moving at forty miles an hour ten feet away?”

“I certainly can,” I said.

I was not lying. I have always tendered Nature's venomous creatures the greatest respect. Since most of those venomous creatures congregate in Africa, it is little wonder my heart is in my mouth every time Nancy takes me there.

“I only fear two things,” Ben said, observing me cowering in the front seat next to him. “Cape Buffalo and hippos. This snake is quiet. Just look at him.”

I allowed myself to peer through the window next to Ben. He was right. The snake lay there like a piece of old garden hose. It might as well have been dead for all the movement I could see. After a few moments, it twisted itself into a paper clip, slithered back along itself and disappeared into the clump of bushes behind it.

“You see,” said Ben. “He doesn't want any trouble. He is only dangerous when he lifts himself up and spreads his hood. This one is quite peaceful.”

I wanted to tell Ben what bothered me was not this particular snake. Rather it was what snakes stand for. I didn’t. For one thing I wasn’t really sure. I’m still not. For another Ben would have thought me even more pusillanimous than he already did.

I have heard that we are all hard-wired to fear snakes and spiders. I don't really believe that. For one thing if most snakes behave the way Ben said they do—that is, they want no part of us—then why would they ever have posed a problem that Madam Evolution had to take to her complaint department? And then there is Michelle Brown, a young woman who is currently doing research on the female behavior of red colubus monkeys in the Kibale National Forest. She told me she kept snakes as pets when she was growing up, including a python. Would one have to say that Michelle and the thousands of snake fanciers like her are genetically defective? Hardly.

I think the truth is that I learned as a child that it was a snake that deceived Adam and Eve. I learned that the snake is the source of all our woes. The deadly spitting cobra, the black mamba, the bushwhacker, the puff adder, they are all the spawn of the devil. It was an asp that killed Cleopatra. It is the snake in the Garden of Eden that will end up killing me.

Click here to listen to this entry in audio

That's Birding

“There's a bird,” I had said en route to Mweya Lodge. I was trying to be helpful.

On safari if someone spots a Pin-tailed Whydah or a Red Bishop Bird and I don’t, I won’t reach for the Prozac. Not so, my companions. As bird-watchers they obey inviolable rules. By far and away the most important one is: Everybody has to see whatever everybody else has seen before the land cruiser moves an inch.

“It's a pygmy kingfisher,” said Ben, our guide, driver and consummate bird-watcher.

“Where?” said several voices behind me.

Ben has been a Ugandan guide for over a quarter of a century. He is wise, extremely knowledgeable when it comes to birds, animals and people and their watchers. He is, above all, a very patient man.

“That bush,” Ben pointed.

I always sat in the front seat next to Ben. There I could snooze without bothering anyone. Since the bird-watchers were all behind me, I had no idea who said what in the ensuing dialogue. Nevertheless, the dialogue is accurate. My companions have assured me so.

“What bush?” said one of the voices.

“At two o'oclock.”

“I see it.”

“The bird?”

“No. The bush.”

“Do you see the bush?”

“Which bush? There are more than one.”

“Yes, I know. The one with the two dead branches.”

“I see two bushes with two dead branches.”

“The one on the right.”

“Yes, I see it.”

“I don't.”

“It's there.”

“Where?”

“Please take down your binoculars,” said Ben pointing.

“Oh, you mean this one right here in front of us.”

“Yes,” said Ben. “Go to the second dead branch.”

“From the top or the bottom?”

“Bottom.”

“Now move along the branch to the end.”

“O.K.”

“Now, look back...”

“Oh, wait! I see it now.”

“Well, I don't.”

“Me neither.”

“Neither can I.”

“It's beautiful. What is it?”

“A pygmy kingfisher,” said Ben.

“I don't know why I can't see the bird.”

Ben got out of the land cruiser.

“You see this bush?”

“Which one?”

“Please. Take down your binoculars. Follow my hand.”

“Oh, that bush. I thought you meant the one back there.”

“Now go to the second branch.”

“O.K.”

“Please. Take down your binoculars. Now move to the very end.”

“O.K.”

“Now look back.”

“Oh, yes. I see it now.”

“So do I.”

“Me, too.”

Ben got back in the land cruiser, put it in gear, and moved on up the road toward Mweya Lodge.

Then he turned to me and said, “That's birding.”

Click here to listen to this entry in audio

Half-full or Half-empty?

What we saw that morning in Kibale was the tourist end of the chimpanzee forest; not the research end. We got a glimpse of the latter that night. Richard Wrangham, author of Demonic Males (highly recommended reading) and a member of Harvard University’s Biological Anthropology faculty, joined us for dinner. We were staying at Ndale Lodge, a hostelry built high up on a ridge that overlooks one of the district’s many crater lakes. The owner of the Ndale is a young Britisher, Irish, I think. His parents ran a pub back home. Now he runs Ndale in the heart of Africa. On the side of the next hill over he points out his sister’s home. She is an experimental farmer, trying her hand at raising a new crop, tapioca, I think. Richard and his wife, Elizabeth, have a house nearby, convenient to his research center in the Kibale National Forest. I have the impression of a tight British community in the area, people who have exchanged the cluttered civility of England for the spacious opportunity of Africa. Since this life doesn't suit me at all, I don't suppose I'll ever know how wide of the mark my impressions are.

Over coffee and dessert someone asked Richard about the chimpanzee's use of tools. The questioner had been told that they have been known to use thick clubs to crack open nuts and thin sticks to gather in honey. Richard said that there had been a great deal of research on the tool use of chimpanzees. He added that the one thing that his research group could claim as purely theirs was not food related. Non-alpha males will beat females with sticks. Richard surmised that they do it to make females mate with them; in other words, a form of rape if, indeed, one can talk about “rape” in the chimpanzee world.

Richard's view of the primate world is a nasty one. Beneath a facade of placidness, these brutes are constantly engaged in strategies of domination, subjugation and oppression. They are doomed to a lifetime of testing and being tested. Who shall be number one? Who shall not? This testing is, according to him, preprogrammed. Males do it by pushing one another around until one of them is no longer pushable. Females do it in a more roundabout way. They leave the community at childbearing age and are forced to find a place for themselves in a new community. The ones who manage it are, presumably, fitter than the ones who don't.

Like it or not, I have drawn lessons about ourselves from all this. Some of us see the glass half full. Others see it half empty. I see it not only as half-empty, but cracked. I assume that I have inherited my dismal bent from a like-minded ancestor, probably my mother. Richard thinks we may have inherited a lot more than a dismal outlook from our ancestors. The genocidal inclination of human beings he sees as a behavior inherited from chimpanzees. He acknowledges that we have a cerebrum that can control such inclinations but the inclinations themselves may well be hardwired, a survival strategy in chimpanzees gone haywire in homo sapiens. The mutual slaughter along tribal lines in Kenya between the Kikuyu and the Luo is just the most recent instantiation of this unhappy inclination.

A walk in Kibale National Forest is a walk on the wild side.

Click here to listen to this entry in audio