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.
