SNAKE!

You'd be forgiven, Legion of Fans (LOF), after spending some time reading my blog (get back to work, the lot of you), that the most dangerous thing that can happen to you in Africa is being hit by a falling monkey turd, or harrassed by immigration officals at obscure border posts.

Not so...

When we arrived at Tinga (I won't put the link in again as I don't want to rub our good fortune in too much) I said to the head guide, Mr Q, who was hanging around reception: "Hey, did you hear about the dude who got nailed by the lioness?"

The news at the time was full of the story of Kruger Park trails ranger Rudi Lorist who had been mauled by a lioness while leading a walking safari. Realising the lioness had cubs, and was therefore very protective of them, Rudi had tried giving her a wide berth, but she went for him anyway. She charged him and Rudi got a shot off, hitting her in the lower jaw. Sadly, she died, but not before raking Rudi's arms with her upper teeth. Happily, father-of-two Rudi and all his tourists lived.

"Yes, dude," replied Mr Q, "here's his brother." And sure enough, there was Rudi's brother, who is the manager of Tinga's Narina Lodge. Small, dangerous, world here in the Kruger Park.

I've been on plenty of walks in the Kruger Park and other parts of Africa and even went tracking lions in Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe. There was nothing about Rudi's story that turned me off the concept of walking in lion-infested bushveld. Far from it. As sad as it was that an animal died, Rudi's training saved his life, and possibly the lives of the people in his care.

I'm not scared of much at all, in fact, LOF. I've parachuted and bungee jumped, spent time on warlike operations (which is what we call going to war these days - although admittedly I spent my time in Afghanistan sitting at a desk typing and drinking coffee and listening to my iPod), been chased by a black rhino and had lions sniffing around my tent in the middle of the night (OK, that was a bit scary). Me, I'm not even scared of spiders or mice.

However, the one thing I am truly, utterly, deeply, madly petrified of (other than death) is snakes.

I can't think of any more words for scared, but if I could I would insert them. Mortified.

I wear boots and socks in the evenings, I keep my tent flaps zipped up all the time and I even roll our bedding up each morning just on the off chance that some snake might have found a way around my defences and snuck in, to lay in ambush between our sheets.

So, imagine, if you will, my surprise when the other night, after consuming a good deal of beer and red wine, I approached the ablutions block in Pretoriuskop Camp in the Kruger National Park at about 9pm and discovered a thick bootlace wrapped around the door handle.

"Odd," I may very well have said out aloud. Why would someone wrap a thick bootlace around the door handle of the toilet block? Even odder, LOF, was what happened next. As I reached for the door handle the bootlace started squirming.

When I (and this will tell you how drunk I was) touched the door handle, the bootlace reared up and struck at my hand with its small pointed head and tiny but sharp fangs.

Clearly, this was no bootlace.

'Snake,' I thought to myself, looking down at my hand as I kicked open the door. I walked into the ablutions block and thought I should find something I could use to knock the small snake off the door handle and shoo it into the grass, lest some other unsuspecting drunkard be attacked.

And then I stopped.

In the middle of the empty ablutions block I looked around me, catching my reflection in one of the mirrors. What's wrong with you, Mr Blog, I asked myself? Why aren't you crying like a little girl and running around in circles? You have just been attacked (kind of) by a snake and here you are, standing calmly, thinking of ways to shoo it away.

'It must be the booze,' I replied to myself.

I found a mop, and carrying it by the yucky end I went back to the door, kicked it open and brushed the snake on to the stoep (as we call the verandah or patio here in Africa). It squiggled around a bit, finding it hard to gain purchase on the slippery concrete, to I nudged it with the end of the mop some more.

"Off you go," I said to it, and burped.

It was a small snake, but like a little man it was full of anger and aggro. Instead of realising its lucky break - that I wasn't going to kill it (as I probably should have) it reared up to its full 20 centimetre height and started striking and attacking the end of the mop.

"So much for being more scared of me than I am of you," I said to it. "Off you go, you disgusting little thing." I pushed and prodded it - the snake continuing a fierce rear guard action all the way, until it finally realised it couldn't kill the mop, or me, and it slithered away.

I went back inside, replaced the mop and thought I had better see to myself. I inspected the knuckle of my right index finger and saw that I had recieved a tiny, but noticeable scratch. The skin wasn't broken.

It occurred to me I should wash the wound but then as I was holding my finger uder the water I remembered an Army lecturer from some decades ago telling us not to wash the wound if bitten by a snake as if it turned out to be a dangerous one then the traces of venom could be used to identify it if the body of the snake wasn't handy. Not being particularly environmentally-friendly in the Army (in the olden days at least) we were also taught to kill a snake that bit us, if possible, for identifcation (and manly payback) purposes.

I remember, as a wide eyed, slightly terrified 19-year-old infantryman wondering how I would be able to kill a snake that had just bitten me. Surely I would have passed out from fear or be crying my eyes out by this stage.

"Damn," I said out loud. Not only had I failed to kill the snake, I was washing away the venom that might identify it. How would the doctors know which anti-venom to administer? Perhaps I might die here in the Pretoriuskop ablutions block.

This was more the real me. "Mrs Blog!" I called (using her real name, of course). She was next door in the ladies. "Err, come in here."

"What, what?" she squealed, knowing something must be wrong.

"OK, first, you won't believe this. There was a snake on the door handle and I chased it away and didn't kill it and I haven't panicked or cried or anything." I was quite proud of myself.

"And...?"

"Oh, and it scratched me."

She said she was off to find the camp's night duty manager and would call a doctor. Feeling remarkably calm, very brave and still quite drunk I said, "No, don't bother them."

Mrs B insisted and I insisted back, but I won the day, until I started walking out of the ablution block. I felt my finger start to throb. A weird, pulsing, constricting kind of numbness started shooting up the inside of my arm. I felt the gland in my armpit swell and pulsate. "Um, maybe you should call the manager, after all."

We walked the short distance back to our tent and Mrs B called the duty manager. While we waited for him to arrive I supervised her in wrapping a pressure bandage around my arm from armpit to hand, to slow the passage of any poison. The army training was kicking in and the alcohol was kicking out.

"I want a beer," I said.

"You'll get no such thing," she replied.

I felt I needed to return to my prior level of intoxicaiton, lest I revert to type and start crying and weeing my pants, but she would have none of it.

The night duty manager, a very nice man named Philip, arrived a few minutes later. He asked me to describe the snake and then called the senior ranger on his cellphone. He spoke rapidly to the ranger in Shangaan. I only a know a few words but I picked up "nyoka", which means snake in various African dialects and, to my great concern, the word "cobra" in English.

Gulp. "Cobra?" I said to Mrs B.

Philip passed the phone to me. It sounded like the Ranger and his family were watching TV. He advised me to sit still and wait and see what happened. He would also get Philip to call the doctor. "Um, OK," I said.

Philip called the doctor and from the background noise on the end of the line it sounded like we had interrupted a dinner party.

"It's highly unlikely you've been invenomated or that it was a deadly snake," the Doctor said. I wondered how he could tell all this over the phone, but it was nice to hear someone say all that anyway. I also recalled from my military training that you should always reassure the patient they are going to be OK, even if they have been bitten by a Taipan (certain death sentence) or had their stomach blown out by a mortar shell.

"Just sit still for an hour and call me back if you develop any neurological signs."

"What do you mean by that?" I asked.

"Tingling around the lips, numbess, spasms... that sort thing..."

That sort of thing? What about, like, paralysis, necrosis, organ shut down, that sort of thing? I felt the doctor needed a little more info, so I repeated the bit about the numbess in my fingers, the shooting, throbbing sensation up my arm, the swelling in my glands...

"Hmmm, he said, that could just be..." He seemed reluctant to finish the sentence.

"Psychosematic?" I ventured.

"Ja," he replied, with a you-said-it-not-me tone, "psychosematic."

I thanked him and relayed his Rx to Mrs Blog. 'Lie down for an hour and see if you die.'

Mrs Blog laid me to rest on our foam camping mattress, propping my banaged arm up with one arm. She relented and acceeded to my last wish, to have a beer, and I propped myself up in bed, with a beer in one hand and an excellent Deon Meyer book in the other.

When the lip tingling, necrosis and organ shut-down began I would know that I had died happy, in a beautiful place, with the woman I love, a beer in one hand and a good book in the other.

I would go out knowing that when it came to the crunch I had looked the snake in its tiny beady eyes; I had been environmentally PC and not killed it; I had confronted my worst fear in life; and I had not peed my pants.

After an hour, with no change and me feeling absolutley fine and (once more) pleasantly inebriated, Mrs Blog (who was also quite drunk by now) and I made a joint decision to remove the bandage, just to see what happened (you can see how pissed we both were). I braced myself for the rush of poison into my system, but nothing happened.

Philip stopped by the next morning, and the next evening, and the following morning to make sure I was still alive, which was very nice of him and I assured him, as I will do again this evening when he drops by, that I am 100 per cent alive and well.

And still terrified of snakes (when sober).

What about you, LOF? What are you scared of, you bunch of nancy boys and girls?