Snakes

There are numerous venomous snakes living in South Africa, of which the Rinkhals and the Black Mamba are two of the better known.  We encountered snakes all the time while living on the farm.  I never really got used to, nor developed a liking for them.

On occasion my father would find a mole snake in the veld, and after popping it into a hessian sack, would come home with his prize slung over his shoulder.  Even though the snake was one of the harmless variety, it still sent a shiver down my spine as I watched it's slowly writh in the bottom of the bag.  My father never killed Mole snakes, but took them back to where he had found them, and let them lose again.

My mother had a number of encounters with snakes over the years.  Being a city girl, she spent her first fifteen years on the farm, checking for snakes under all the beds and in the cupboards. The very night she decided to give up this habit, was the night a snake came slithering across the room from under the dressing table.   My friend from Germany has a similar phobia about snakes, and so when she visited me a few years ago, she went through the same ritual of looking under all the beds and tables and chairs, much to my amusement.

Between the bathroom and the kitchen with it's large wood stove, was an enclosed veranda with a sort of flagstone floor.  It was here that my mother witnessed a large Rinkhals disappear down a crack between the stones.  She quickly fetched my father's shotgun and poking it down the hole, pulled the trigger.  Fortunately for her, nothing happened, and she had the presence of mind not to try again, otherwise my father might have come home to a very grizzly finding!

Once when my mother was watering the garden, she noticed in her peripheral vision, a piece of the hose sitting up next to her.  On closer inspection, there sitting a short distance from her was a Rinkhals, his hooded head flattened and ready to strike.  My mother, bless her cotton socks, ran so fast, she completely missed the entrance to the house.

My father once found a huge rock with a large pothole gouged out of the top, from millions of years of being open to the elements.  He thought it would make an ideal birdbath, so he proceeded to get it transported down to the old house on the back of the trailer, to be incorporate into our garden.  It wasn't more than a few days before we noticed the dogs going crazy and barking incessantly at the rock.  My big sister who was always very brave, got on all fours and peered under the rock to see what they were barking at.  There, all curled up and having a bit of a snooze, was the most enormous snake imaginable.  Out came the shotgun, and the interloper was quickly disposed of.  Unfortunately we never really took to the birdbath after that.

All in all, snakes were part and parcel of living on a farm, and one had to be aware at all times when walking through the veld, that to step on a snake, would not be the wisest thing to do.  Being cold-blooded, they would usually lie sunning themselves right in the middle of a pathway.  My son stepped over one such snake while walking in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains.  Fortunately for him, he didn't step on it and so came home rather white faced to tell the tale.