We called the puppy Bandit, a very appropriate name for a dog that ran off with everything she could get her paws on. When Luis Raoul made her a splendid doghouse out of mahogany, Bandit set about furnishing its interior with all sorts of things she purloined - one of the worker’s hats which she chewed up, shoes, some of O’D’s spanners, pieces of wood, a couple of my capulanas, and the odd sweater or two.
Miss Sydney bullied Bandit unmercifully, craftily taking advantage of my presence to protect her from any retaliation. While I sat on the sofa reading, with Miss Sydney on my lap and Bandit lying on the floor next to my bandaged foot, she would often lean over my knees and give Bandit a gratuitous slap on her head. Then, when the dog looked up in surprise, one of Miss Sydney’s tiny black paws would shoot out and hit Bandit viciously on the nose five times with a right and a left so fast that the action was just a blur, Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap! Whap!
When my bandages came off for the last time, they revealed a toe that looked perfectly normal except for its bright lobster pink colour. Although this faded over time, the same couldn’t be said for my fear of the tiny worm that had almost cost me my foot.
The ending of my captivity brought freedom to Miss Sydney and Bandit as well. No longer voluntarily tied to the sofa with me, they now followed me outside and while I walked around under the trees and down the forest track, they chased butterflies and investigated holes. With the expansion of their world and so many new things to explore and examine, their attention was diverted from each other and an uneasy truce developed between them. Knowing no fear, Bandit often followed strange scents with her pointy nose and heedlessly plunged into tall grass, disappearing completely from view.
Miss Sydney, too, behaved recklessly. Despite her tiny size, her ego was enormous. Nothing seemed to scare her, as we were soon to find out when O’D began to have his encounters with snakes.
It all began early one morning when he went to switch on the saw.
Standing in front of the switchbox, he opened its small door and was about to stick his hand inside the box when his eyes caught sight of something black coiled up amongst the electrical wires. A small snake! This gave him a bit of a shock, of course, but it was only the prelude to more and even bigger shocks that were to come later on that evening and the following afternoon.
We were having sugar bean soup and bread rolls for supper and as it was already dark that evening, O’D was the one who (thankfully) went down the stairs to get the butter from the deep freeze in the room under the house.
He’d only been gone for a few seconds when I heard him shouting urgently for me.
“Val! Val! Bring the torch! Quickly!”
I grabbed the torch and ran down the back stairs.
“What is it?”
“Shine the torch over there,” he ordered, with what sounded like a quiver in his voice as he pointed a finger at a spot on the ground, “but be careful and don’t come any closer. I think I’ve just been walking next to a giant snake!”
A giant snake! With a hand that trembled, I shone the torch on the ground. What I saw made me catch my breath with awe. “Wow!” Unknowingly, O’D had been ambling along the side of the house in the company of a five metre long python!
According to my snake book, pythons are non-venomous and kill their prey (small buck, rabbits, cane rats and so on) by constricting them until all their bones were crushed.
Although the book also mentioned that pythons rarely attacked humans, it had admitted that there had been cases of young herd boys being crushed and swallowed. Mindful of this, I kept a safe distance between myself and the snake, just in case this one happened to be the rare exception!
As wary as I was, O’D armed himself with a long pole. “I’m going to re-direct the python away from the house,” he told me, “and send it down towards the river.”
He was just giving the python a gentle prod with the pole when Sydney and Bandit appeared on the scene and caused a little bit of chaos. Filled with the curiosity of the young, they foolishly ran right up to the snake for an investigative sniff. They were both just the right size for a python’s dinner and for a heart-stopping moment I thought the tiny Miss Sydney had had it!
She danced around the python’s head and its large dark eyes, gleaming in the torchlight, turned to look sideways at her.
Alarmed, I gave a shout. “Get away from there, you crazy cat!”
My shout did the trick. More frightened by my shout than by an enormous snake, dog and cat both leapt out of the way.
With O’D’s help in the form of several more prods, the python wended its slow and majestic way across the ground towards the mango trees and then, when it reached the mass of tall yellow grass growing down to the Nhamacoa River, it slid inside and disappeared.
“Phew!” I breathed a long sigh of relief. “For a moment there, I thought that python was going to have Miss Sydney for an entrée.”
“For a moment there, I thought I was going to be the python’s entrée,” O’D said. “I almost walked on top of it!”
Back in the sitting room, a rather unwelcome thought occurred to me. “That’s the second time today that a snake has given you a fright, O’D,” I said. “You’d better be careful. Things actually do seem to go in threes.”
The next day, at four o’clock in the afternoon, I carried Bandit’s food bowl out to her and put it down as usual next to her doghouse. The bowl was filled with Zimbabwe’s nourishing ‘Rambo’ dog food, on top of which I had placed a large banana. Bandit loved bananas almost as much as she loved bones.
She ran up to the bowl, eager as always to eat, but then surprised me by suddenly leaping back from it as if she’d been stung. Legs flying around wildly with panic, she charged back into the house where she sat shivering violently in the corridor just inside the open front door.
I stared at her in amazement. What on earth was going on? “Don’t you like your food today, Bandit?”
Bandit paid no attention to me but kept her soft brown eyes riveted on the white bath which O’D had still not installed in the bathroom and was leaning against the verandah wall near her doghouse.
“O … kay,” I said slowly, as I nervously followed Bandit’s example and began to edge towards the front door, keeping my eyes fixed on the bath. “So it’s not your food that’s bad, Bandit … it’s something else.”
I’d only taken a few steps away when something began to slide out from behind the bath towards me. It was black and menacing and seemed to go on and on and on. It chilled my blood and gave me as big a fright as it had given my dog.
A Mozambican Spitting Cobra!
The snake saw me standing a short distance away from it and rose up in the air, threateningly spreading out its hood.
For a split second I stared into its two black eyes, staring so intently back at me. These snakes, I had read, could shoot their venom straight into your eyes over a distance of three metres.
I flung myself at the door, scrambling for safety very much like Bandit had done, and then peered cautiously around the doorframe to see if certain death was following me.
It wasn’t. My rapid disappearance, it seemed, had reassured the cobra. Deflating its hood, it turned away from the house and began to glide off in the opposite direction.
On its way to the bush, it slid underneath our red Toyota pickup and then, vanished up into the engine compartment of our car!
Thunderstruck, I stared at our pickup, now home to a deadly serpent. How on earth were we going to get rid of our new sitting tenant? There was only one thing to do. Filling my lungs to capacity with air and hoping that O’D and some of our workers would hear me, I shouted “O’D! O’D! Cobra! COBRA!” at the top of my voice.
Fortunately, they were working near the avocado trees not far away and came running to the rescue, armed with sticks.
“There’s a cobra in the engine of the car,” I told O’D, pointing a finger at the pickup, “I’ve just seen it going in there!”
O’D turned
to look at the pickup and irritated me with his answer. “Oh, I doubt if it actually went inside,” he said, “you just thought it did. And if it did go in there, it probably got out again. It’s probably gone by now.”
“It’s not gone!” I cried. “Believe me! I was watching it all the time. It went up into the engine and it didn’t come out again!”
Heaving a sigh of resignation, O’D walked over to the pickup to humour me. Certain that he was right and the cobra had gone, he opened the bonnet … lifted it up … gave a loud and peculiar high-pitched scream … and then slammed the bonnet shut again.
“I told you it was in there,” I said.
Shaken by the sight of a large Mozambican Spitting Cobra coiled up on top of the engine of his car and looking at him with its black eyes, O’D said, “It will probably leave by itself.”
“But how will we know that it’s left unless we actually see it leaving? It might not leave …” I shuddered at the thought of driving around with a dangerous snake “… it might end up under the seat!”
“It can’t get from the engine into the cab,” O’D assured me. “It’s completely closed off.”
For a while, he stared at the pickup in silence and despite himself, I could see my words working on his mind. He would have to do something. If he didn’t, he might well find himself driving around with a dangerous snake in the car.
Walking over to the pickup, he gingerly opened the driver’s door and put the car into neutral gear. “Push,” he ordered our workers and from outside the car, grasped the steering wheel with one hand.
Slowly, they pushed the Toyota a little distance away from the house and then O’D walked reluctantly around to the bonnet.
“Wait!” I cried. “You’ll all need safety goggles to protect your eyes. I’ll go and get some for you.”
“I don’t need goggles,” O’D said grumpily. He glanced around at his small band of workers. “Do any of you want to wear goggles?”
Taking their cue from their boss, they all shook their heads.
“Alright,” he told them. “Let’s get this snake out of the car.”
O’D carefully opened the bonnet of the car again and while he and our workers tried to extricate the cobra with their sticks, I went back inside the house.
Not only did I close the door, just in case an angry snake decided to use the house as a refuge but I also secured it with the wooden Fred Flintstone-type locks Raimundo had made. I shut all the windows as well and then I went back into the sitting room and picked up a book. It was far too nerve-wracking to watch O’D and our workers dealing with such a deadly snake.
With my nose in my book, I didn’t see O’D try out his usual method of persuading a snake to leave by prodding at it with a long stick. This time, however, the snake refused to take the hint. It retreated deeper into the bits and pieces of the motor and then it disappeared completely down a hole - a hole which led directly into the front of the cab!
Dumbfounded, O’D let down his guard. He looked in through the open door and the cobra, on the floor by the driver’s seat, grasped at its opportunity. As quick as a flash and only a short distance away from O’D, it squirted its venom straight into his left eye.
Clutching at his face, he staggered back in shock and pain.
The first I knew of this was when I heard O’D hammering and battering at the locked front door and shouting at me at the top of his voice.
“Let me in! Open the bloody door! Open the bloody door and let me in!”
Heart thudding in my chest, I threw down my book and ran to the door, fearing the worst. We were miles away from proper medical attention and something awful had obviously happened. Had he been given a lethal bite ? Who would be able to help us? And how long did he have to live …
I wrenched the door open and O’D rushed inside.
“My eye,” he shouted, “poison in my left eye!”
This information immediately filled me with panic. I remembered reading that the venom from a Spitting Cobra could destroy your eyesight. Scar your eyes and blind you for the rest of your life! Was O’D going to go blind? Oh, what were we going to do? What were we going to DO? Then, another memory flashed into my mind. The memory of an old black and white wildlife film I had once watched years ago, showing a cobra shooting its venom onto the protective glasses of the producer of the film. They had mentioned an antidote …
I ran to the table and grabbed a carton of Ultra Mel.
“Milk! We’ve got to wash out your eye with milk, O’D!”
While O’D forced his eye open, I poured milk into it, over and over again. Milk ran down his face, onto his clothes, splashed onto the floor and lay in white pools and puddles around his feet.
“Maybe we need more,” he gasped.
I ripped open another carton.
After we’d gone through about two litres of milk in our fear and panic, O’D said, “Alright. I think that’s enough.”
I examined his eye. It was a frightening scarlet colour. “How does it feel?” I asked, fearfully. “Can you see out of it?”
“No,” he answered. “It’s very blurry and it hurts like hell. I think I’d better get over to Macate and talk to Mario about this.”
Mario gave O’D a bottle of saline solution and told him to bathe his eye with it as well to soothe the pain. The milk, it seemed, had been the right thing to use and within a few days, O’D’s eye was back to normal … thanks to an ancient film I had seen when I was young.
Later on in the week, O’D and Caetano drove off to Gondola and during the drive, O’D began to tell Caetano about his encounter with the Spitting Cobra. When he got to the part where the cobra had disappeared down the hole in the bodywork and had exited into the Toyota’s cab, Caetano, who like most of us was dead scared of snakes, thought the snake was still lurking menacingly around in the car … perhaps even under the very seat that he, Caetano, was sitting on …
“Cobra?” Caetano’s dark eyes widened with terror. “A cobra in the car?”
Before O’D could say another word, Caetano reacted in a way he hadn’t for one moment anticipated. With a wild, jerky movement, he unbuckled his seat belt and threw it off. Then he flung open the door, preparing to leap out of the speeding car and into a road full of traffic, to safety.
“No!” O’D took a hand off the steering wheel and grabbed Caetano’s arm, at the same time slowing the pickup. “Caetano, no!” he shouted. “The cobra’s dead! Dead! Don’t jump!”
“Dead …” The glazed look of panic in Caetano’s eyes cleared and he closed the door, falling back limply against the seat. A little embarrassed, he gave a shaky laugh. “I thought it was still here,” he said. “A cobra! A cobra in the car with us!”
“Caetano,” O’D said, “do you think I’d be driving around in my car knowing that there’s a snake in it? Even I’m not that mad!”
It’s true to say that quite often something good comes out of something bad. The fact that the bath had been used as a hiding place by a venomous snake which had attacked him, galvanized O’D into action as I had never been able to do. In no time at all, the white bath was installed in the bathroom. Now at last I was able to lie down in the bath, to luxuriate in it by covering myself up to the neck with water. And all because of a Mozambican Spitting Cobra!
Some weeks later, something else was to happen to brighten up my life. I was sitting at my desk in the spare bedroom and typing some letters on my thirty year old Facit manual typewriter, when I heard a little knock at the door. I looked up and there, standing in the doorway, was a familiar and very welcome little figure.
“Biasse!” I cried, with delight.
“Hello, Madam,” he said. “I’m sorry I left the way I did. Can I come back and work for you again?”
There had been quite a few changes during Biasse’s absence and so when he started work again and stood in front of the gleaming white Brazilian cooker, I spent some time carefully explaining the dangers of gas to him. Unfortunately, I didn’t ta
ke into account the equally dangerous Mozambican matches we used to light the gas cooker. These matchboxes were filled with matches whose heads irritatingly fell off - or flew off - when you struck them. So, it was only a matter of time before the combination of gas and faulty Mozambican matches led to an alarming incident.
One morning, while I was typing in the spare bedroom again, a peculiar and rather unpleasant odour began to drift down the corridor and then into the room. I stopped typing and raised my nose to sniff at the air, to identify the smell. It was not the aroma of food being cooked … or even of food being burnt, but … my fingers fell off the typewriter keys and I leapt up from my chair … it was the scent of … GAS!
I ran madly down the corridor and when I got to the kitchen doorway, I saw Biasse bending down in front of the open oven with a match and a matchbox in his hands. A little pile of matches without heads lay scattered on the floor by his feet and the room reeked with the gas escaping out of the turned on oven.
“No!” I shouted at the very same moment that Biasse struck another match, successfully this time.
WHUMPH! An enormous sheet of blue flame shot out from the bottom of the cooker, around Biasse’s veldskoens and across the kitchen floor.
Biasse turned to me. “I dunno about these matches, Madam. They’re no good.”
I was doubly grateful for Biasse’s return on the day when O’D worked hard on repairing the tractor engine and turned the soapy water in the new bath into an increasingly oily, dirty, black colour everytime he washed his hands and arms in it.
Saving and recycling water was all very well, I thought, as I stood over my no longer pristine white bath but this was too much! No way did I want to use this water again, not even in the loo!
Bending over the bath, I felt around in the opaque water for the chain that was attached to the plug. It was obviously a Chinese chain and plug, because it had come away from the bath on the very first day we had used it. My fingers brushed against something … aha! … and I grasped hold of it, pulled it out of the water and up in the air, expecting to see the white plug … but instead … saw that my fingers were clutching the long, water-slimy tail of a large and soggy brown rat with little black eyes and sticking out teeth that had been lying dead in the black bathwater for some time …
Monkeys in My Garden Page 32