At the risk of portraying the Sierra Leone experience as predominantly a problem of critters, I must add this tale just experienced. I had finished my 8:00 a.m. lecture early (duh, how much can you say at that hour of the morning on any subject?) and had headed back to my bungalow for a second cup of coffee before my 10:00 a.m. class convened. I entered my porch, unlocked my kitchen door, and there, lounging in the window, was a four-foot green snake staring at me. Yes, I was to learn later that they are poisonous but my first reaction, the snake being rather far away, was to take a picture of it. I mean, he didn’t seem like he was going anywhere so I ran and grabbed my camera:
He flicked his tongue at me (I seem to remember that’s the snakey way of smelling) but didn’t move to attack me. The second thing I did was to call my friend, fellow lecturer, and hero, Philip Thulla, who did away with that black cobra over a month ago. Reticently, he agreed to come down the hill and see what he could do but, from the tone of his voice, I knew this wasn’t the way he wanted to start his day!
“Oooo! Dis na di problem-o!” he burst out in Krio. As quickly, he bolted from the kitchen, headed out the front door and deeper into our little university neighborhood and returned with a couple of boys who, “Aren’t afraid of snakes!”
Musa, taking charge, immediately asked if I had any Shell-Tox. “Are you kidding?” I gloated (I had just bought a back-up canister the week before…you can never have too much Shell-Tox). He ran into the kitchen and began to spray the heck out of the snake, who now opened his mouth showing his poisonous fangs. I quickly became overcome by the fumes and retreated to the living room to retch.
By the time I got back to the kitchen, Philip, with his ire up and manning a huge stick stolen from the neighbor’s fence, was madly whacking away at the crazed snake, now retreated into the back corner of a cabinet below my rather crude kitchen counter. He was able to injure it in a couple of places allowing them to fling it out onto the porch floor.
The snake, mortally wounded but still writhing, was whisked out the door with my trusty broom and here he is in his last breath. That leaf, by the way, is about nine inches long…
Musa lifted him onto the end of Philip’s big stick and was about to fling it into the bush behind my house but Philip convinced him to, “Put it where we can always see it…so we’ll KNOW it’s dead!”
Here is its final resting place, the result of a nice shot, some twenty feet in the air.
Just another dull day in Africa!
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