It happened that I had a baby sister who could just toddle about on
two legs, having previously gone on all-fours. One midsummer day she
was taken up and put on a rug in the shade of a tree, twenty-five
yards from the sitting-room door, and left alone there to amuse
herself with her dolls and toys. After half an hour or so she appeared
at the door of the sitting-room where her mother was at work, and
standing there with wide-open astonished eyes and moving her hand and
arm as if to point to the place she came from, she uttered the
mysterious word _ku-ku_. It is a wonderful word which the southern
South American mother teaches her child from the moment it begins to
toddle, and is useful in a desert and sparsely inhabited country where
biting, stinging, and other injurious creatures are common. For babies
when they learn to crawl and to walk are eager to investigate and have
no natural sense of danger. Take as an illustration the case of the
gigantic hairy brown spider, which is excessively abundant in summer
and has the habit of wandering about as if always seeking something -
"something it cannot find, it knows not what"; and in these wanderings
it comes in at the open door and rambles about the room. At the sight
of such a creature the baby is snatched up with the cry of _ku-ku_ and
the intruder slain with a broom or other weapon and thrown out. _Ku-
ku_ means dangerous, and the terrified gestures and the expression of
the nurse or mother when using the word sink into the infant mind, and
when that sound or word is heard there is an instant response, as in
the case of a warning note or cry uttered by a parent bird which
causes the young to fly away or crouch down and hide.
The child's gestures and the word it used caused her mother to run to
the spot where it had been left in the shade, and to her horror she
saw there a huge serpent coiled up in the middle of the rug. Her cries
brought my father on the scene, and seizing a big stick he promptly
dispatched the snake.
The child, said everybody, had had a marvellous escape, and as she had
never previously seen a snake and could not intuitively know it as
dangerous, or _ku-ku_, it was conjectured that she had made some
gesture or attempted to push the snake away when it came on to the
rug, and that it had reared its head and struck viciously at her.
Recalling this incident I concluded that this unknown serpent, which
had been killed because it wanted to share my baby sister's rug, and
my black serpent were one and the same species - possibly they had been
mates - and that they had strayed a distance away from their native
place or else were the last survivors of a colony of their kind in our
plantation.
