A further reason for the black mamba being one of the world’s most dangerous snakes is that he is also one of the, if not the, fastest snake. I doubt that many people confronting mambas in the wild happen to have the inclination to check them with stopwatches, but estimates of their speed have been variously given as twenty miles per hour to “faster than a running horse.” These are, in my opinion, vast exaggerations, although I also consider the “official” estimate of seven miles per hour a bit low. A black mamba in a hurry can probably crank out a good ten miles per hour over a short distance. Because of their rippling undulation, they seem to be going much faster than they actually are, and their terrifying ability to ghost in a flicker across the tops of chest-high grass stalks is practically supernatural. In any case experts agree they are at least twice as fast as any North American snake.
As mentioned, it is the dead-black lining of the mamba’s mouth that gives this species its monicker, not the body coloration, which varies from a dull dun to a gun-metal gray. Newly hatched black mambas are very hard to distinguish from the Jameson’s and green varieties, since they resemble their cousins in color until older. The black mamba’s scales are lackluster, not as shiny as the cobra’s, making him harder to see in cover.
Mamba poison, especially the volume that may be injected by a large individual, is fantastically toxic, and a solid bite, even with antivenin at hand, usually means a quick, singularly unpleasant death. Black mamba venom, which is twice as deadly as even the green mamba poison, paralyzes the breathing and, according to some herpetologists, affects the vagus nerve that controls heartbeat, letting the heart literally run wild. How quickly it can kill was elucidated a few years ago in Botswana.
In the Okavango Swamp of Ngamiland, quite near where I used to hunt, a white man was hunting crocodiles under permit at night, so the local story goes. (I personally suspect that since he was alone he was not actually hunting crocs although licensed to do so, because he would have had a gaffer and another assistant to help him recover the bodies. At any rate, he was in a small boat alone.) We’ll never know how he bumped into the mamba that struck him—perhaps it had been hiding in his boat, maybe it had been swimming and the man disturbed it with a paddle. It may even have struck him from an overhanging tree. It’s beside the point. His body was found in the boat next day, his antivenin kit open. He never had time to use it, presumably dying before he could administer the serum.
Well mixed through the African records are many reports of a single mamba killing several people. One such snake lived in the London Zoo in the 1950s, having been captured by the greatest of Africa’s “Snake Men,” C. J. P. Ionides, after killing seven people in a matter of months. Another black mamba, in Rhodesia, went deep-end and killed eleven people and several sheep, all the bitten expiring in less than half an hour. Dr. Phil Kahl, who recently returned from southwest Africa, told me of a game ranger bitten in 1977 who died in twenty minutes. The tendency of black mambas to get into the thatching of native huts in their hunt for vermin often leads to catastrophe. A man who worked for me in Zambia as a waiter told me that a black mamba had fallen from the roof of his brother’s hut and killed him, his wife, and three children one night near Chipata, or as it was called at the time, Fort Jameson. There are so many cases of this happening that I have no reason not to believe him.
One of the major problems with black mambas is that they (as well as cobras and other species) are attracted by the mice and voles that so frequently take up residence around a safari camp. In 1969, when Peter Hankin gave up much of his hunting activities to maintain the base supply camp at Chitangulu on the Luangwa, the hub of outlying safari operations, he developed a positive plague of black mambas around the place. After he had killed a dozen or so within a two-week period, he ordered that every person working at or visiting the camp to carry two antivenin kits at all times, even while sleeping. Incredibly, nobody was bitten that season, although there were some close encounters. In the case of snakes, forewarned is forearmed.
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One of the most terrifying encounters I have ever had with a dangerous snake took place on an early October morning in Zambia, on the Munyamadzi River. It had been very hot the previous night and I had slept under a mosquito net on a cot outside the hut with just a kikoy loincloth, lions or no lions. I awoke for the hundredth time at dawn, well basted in sweat, and padded bleary-eyed across the thirty yards to the chimbuzi, a wraparound, grass-walled latrine or “high-fall” on a bluff near the river bank. Still half-asleep, I started to enter and was chilled by a hiss like a ruptured air hose. Half across the open toilet seat, bolted to a cutoff fifty-five-gallon oil drum set into the top of the hole, reared an eight-foot black mamba. His head was as high as my throat, his tongue flickering from his partly open mouth. I clearly remember seeing a couple of strings of saliva stuck between his upper and lower jaws like thick spiderwebs. That I woke up in a hurry is a masterpiece of understatement. Without thinking, I threw the towel I had in my hand at his head and, not waiting to determine the results, bolted out of the latrine and across the space to my hut in a flesh-colored blurr like a Road Runner cartoon. Shaking the big buckshot loads out of the shotgun, I reloaded with birdshot and carefully, very carefully, approached the chimbuzi again. As I inched up, I peeked around the grass baffle. Nothing, no sign of the snake, which bothered me one hell of a lot more than being able to see it would have. The only thing worse than seeing a mamba at close quarters is not seeing a mamba at close quarters. After checking the grass walls carefully, I went outside and looked over the bare dirt. I couldn’t even find a crawl track on the hard earth. Where in blazes had he gone? Aha! Obviously, he had gone down the open toilet and into the latrine hole, I reasoned. With the safety off, I edged back inside the roofless structure.
Sneaking up to the toilet seat, I pushed the muzzles of the double-barreled shotgun up to the edge and levered them downward. There was no movement. In a flash I leaned over the seat and pulled off both barrels, one after the other, straight down the drop-hole. The secondary results were not unlike dynamiting a septic tank while sitting on it, and I certainly got a solid dose of the basic contents of the hole. After, as the British say, purging myself, I managed a cold shower from last night’s water, shouting to my understandably confused staff (who might have been wondering what the bwana was doing blowing up the crapper) to keep an eye out for the snake until I was no longer hors de combat from my sneak raid on the can. Invisible brought over a flashlight and a couple of more shells for the gun, although if that mamba was in the hole, I strongly doubted that he would need any more persuasion. As Invisible held the torch, I held my nose and peered down into the black shambles of the shaft. Whatever else was in it, there was sure no mamba. Where he had gotten to in the less than a minute it took me to get the gun was beyond me, but I couldn’t shake the idea that he might be in the walls or had even crossed over to my hut, where he could be hiding right now. Not about to spend the rest of the season wondering if there was a mamba under the bed, I took the only alternative. I got a live brand from the campfire and lit the chimbuzi after removing the toilet seat, a possession rarer than ambergris in the middle of the bush, and watched it burn merrily to the ground without a glimpse of the snake. Since my hut was the only other cover in sight, I had my men drag out the bed and metal footlockers with sticks along with the rest of my katundu, and fired the hut also. I felt a little stupid when it, too, had completely burned without flushing out the snake. It may have been somewhat extreme a gesture for a little peace of mind, but then, mambas really give me hives. Except there was one problem still remaining: Where was the flaming snake? The way my men were glancing at me sideways, I was starting to wonder if I’d been hallucinating.
Since I did not have a client at the time, the rest of the day was spent building a new hut on the other side of the camp and digging another john. The following day, as I was eating lunch, one of the men came running over to say that there was a big mamba sunning near where the old
latrine had been, on the edge of the bluff. I grabbed the scatter gun and killed him with one shot, his writhing carrying him over the edge and into the river. A few weeks later I was hunting across the river from the camp and suddenly realized where the snake had escaped to that day we met. Below the lip of the cliff were many deepish holes in the clay dug out by nesting colonies of carmine bee-eaters, one of Africa’s most spectacularly beautiful birds, which breed there each year. Almost certainly, the snake had disappeared straight over the edge and into a hole while I ran for my gun. From our side of the river, the holes were invisible and because of the possibility of the undercut banks collapsing, nobody would have thought of walking out to the edge, over the croc-filled water, to investigate.
I was mightily relieved that the snake was finally dead. I have often wondered what might have happened had it been darker in the latrine or if I had sat down on him. I probably would have had hell’s own time with the tourniquet!
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With the exception of the black mamba, the mamba family is composed basically of tree dwellers: the eastern and western green mambas and Jameson’s mamba. All have venom that can kill quite efficiently, although none has the size and potency of the black species. Since they live in trees, it follows that man’s contact with the other mambas is considerably less and they are not nearly as aggressive.
Among the other potentially dangerous tree snakes of Africa are the Boomslang and the bird snake. Both are relatively inoffensive and have fangs in the rear of the mouth similar to the North American coral snake, limiting most bites to those handling the snakes. Boomslang venom is especially powerful and requires a special antivenin, although bites are so infrequent that the snake was not considered more than mildly venomous until a few years ago. There are two species of tree cobras, both happily somewhat rare. One is the gold’s tree cobra, which looks much like a shiny version of a black mamba although it does not attain such length.
There is a charming selection of cobra forms all over Africa, many quite different in appearance but sharing the common ability to kill you quickly if you don’t watch where you step or go reaching around dark holes in kopjes or ant heaps. The genus Naja has six members, including the Asian, or spectacled, cobra, five of which are Afros: yellow, forest, spitting, Egyptian, and a western cousin of the Asian cobra. This doesn’t count the ringhals of Rhodesia and the Republic of South Africa, a highly specialized snake whom I have seen in action.
The ringhals cobra, Hemachatus hemachatus, is one of the two cobras uniquely evolved with the ability to “spit” or spray its venom with surprising accuracy over a distance of seven or eight feet through the use of a modified pair of front fangs. These short teeth have an orifice in the front of each that acts much as the nozzle of a child’s water pistol. Powerful muscles around the venom sacs contract at will, providing the propelling force to project the venom through the hypodermic teeth, out the orifices in a spray toward the eyes. Contact with the eyes or broken skin can cause blindness in a few minutes and even death if untreated. It is my impression that the venom of ringhals (from an Afrikaan word that refers to the neck rings) is somewhat different from other cobra toxins in that it is very quickly absorbed through the conjunctiva, or white, of the eye. Although this snake is generally a pretty good shot, it aims for reflecting objects and may mistake a bright belt buckle or binocular lens for the eyes. The ringhals most likely uses this technique to blind and kill small animals out of reach, although it will bite like a proper son of a bitch if cornered, striking like the other cobras, chewing its venom deep into the wound as it holds on like a snapping turtle. There is another spitting cobra that, although common in much of Africa, is not well distributed in my areas of activity. This is the Naja nigricollis, which is generally (but not always, because of race variations) marked by a single, very broad black band under the hood. I have never run across one, but other hunters tell me he’s not very pleasant.
In 1971, I was on a busman’s holiday in the Ngamo-Sikumi Forest in west-central Rhodesia hunting sable antelope. This is quite thick grass and bush country, sometimes punctuated with kopjes of giant boulders many stories high, which are handy as lookout posts for spotting game movement. I was hunting with just a gunbearer and a tracker, on the spoor of what promised to be a very fine lone bull sable, when we came up to one of these kopjes. The tracker, a MaKalanga whose name I don’t remember, scrambled ahead of me and was looking across a scrubby plain for the bull from atop a six-foot rock at the base of the pile. I was just behind him, about to join him with my binoculars when he gave a strangled shriek of pain and surprise and threw his hands over his face, his fingers digging at his eyes. Startled, I glanced around and saw just the last half of a heavily scaled snake disappear between two rocks in a jumble at about chest height, three-quarters in front of where the tracker was standing.
Chagga, the gunbearer, upon hearing me shout “Nyoka!” (“Snake!”) grabbed the tracker’s leg and pulled him off the rock. Despite the man’s writhing and clutching at his eyes, Chagga pinned him down with a knee on his chest and pried his hands away. To my surprise, he then urinated in the man’s eyes, yelling at me to grab his arms, holding the lids open with his fingers as best he could. When he ran dry, I dashed back for the water bag the tracker had been carrying and together we irrigated the horribly bloodshot eyes with the whole jaw-sack. After ten minutes, even though he was clearly in considerable pain, we were able to tie the man’s shirt over his face and lead him the two miles back to the Land Rover, where I had two kits of polyvalent antivenin. I gave the MaKalanga the sensitivity test for horse serum, the basis of the antivenin, which can kill an allergic man quicker than the snake venom and, when there was no reaction, made a mixture of roughly five to one of sterile water and antivenin. Through the hypodermic syringe, I dripped this slowly into the eyes and after two hours, even though still horribly swollen and discolored, he had regained some sight and eventually recovered completely. Had the tracker been alone or had Chagga not applied such basic action, I doubt he would have ever seen again. He certainly caught a full dose. (Incidentally, I once told this story to a doctor client who told me that urine, as it issues from an undiseased bladder, is actually sterile! An interesting tidbit that might come in handy sometime.)
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Just as is the case with the large, mammalian bad actors, so with the reptiles, there is vast disagreement as to which is Africa’s most dangerous snake. Of course, “dangerous” is one of those slippery words open to wide interpretation. A man stuck in a telephone booth with an angry black mamba would be quite justified in voting for this species. On the other hand, it might also be said that the most dangerous snake is that which is most likely, on a statistical basis, to kill you. It would follow that this snake would also be the most likely to bite you because he’s the most common of the deadly snakes. Following this logic, there is a clear, concise winner, albeit an unlikely one. He isn’t featured in many pulp-fiction tales and most visitors to Africa have never heard of him, but he’s practically everywhere. He’s a heavy, well-marked, Argyle-patterned serpent that only reaches a couple of feet in length, yet attains considerable thickness and weight. He is the African puff adder, Bitis arietans, and he kills more people on that continent than any other snake. He has the very long fangs of the classic adder and packs enough venom to kill five men. Death by puff adder is typical of the agonizing and lingering horror caused by the hemotoxic venoms of the vipers.
The nocturnal habits of the puff adder are as much a cause of death as his powerful venom. Puff adders favor the smooth footpaths of the bushveldt, which stay warm with absorbed sun heat well after dark. Women and children are the largest group bitten; perhaps because of their weight they do not set up the warning vibrations to alert the snake, and so step upon it. This is also the problem with hunters stalking or tiptoeing quietly along the paths. Like the cobra the puff adder is a chewer, opening his mouth and extending his long fangs to literally stab the victim before he closes it to
bite, driving a huge dose of venom deeply into the wound. So dreaded is the bite of a puff adder that many Africans have been known literally to die of shock and fear on receiving the strike.
Unfortunately, the puff adder is quite common and even on cold days will be found basking in the sun. I have seen many but take such care where I walk when hunting that I haven’t had a close call with a live one. I say a “live” one because another professional once killed a big puff adder and, on the request of his client, took the head to dry as a curiosity. He propped the mouth open with a small stick and placed it on the roof of the hut we were sharing. I don’t know if it blew off—I didn’t know it was there in the first place—but I stepped on it with bare feet and a fang lightly punctured my right great toe. Although it scared the screaming bejeesus out of me, there was no venom injected. (Injection of venom is largely voluntary on the snake’s part.) Call it sufficient to say that the other gentleman and I discussed the matter at some length.
Though the bite of a puff adder results in hemorrhage of the mucous membranes and death in about twenty-four hours, often sooner in untreated cases, even with prompt antivenin application gangrene and wide tissue destruction may result with the ultimate consequence of “sloughing” the flesh of a foot or hand. This you can do nicely without, take my word for it. As I wear only bush shorts and sockless Clark’s desert boots, I spend a great deal of time watching the ground, yet, except for aggressive species such as black mambas near camp, I don’t believe in killing snakes. Certainly, the deaths of the few a hunter might shoot would make no difference locally, and they do play their part in the overall scheme of things.
Death in the Long Grass Page 24