Gazing Up At This Bat Suspended Under A Big Green Leaf, Wrapped In His
Black And Buff-Coloured Wings As
In a mantle, I forgot my
disappointment, forgot the serpent, and was so entirely taken up with
the bat that
I paid no attention to a sensation like a pressure or a
dull pain on the instep of my right foot. Then the feeling of pressure
increased and was very curious and was as if I had a heavy object like
a crowbar lying across my foot, and at length I looked down at my
feet, and to my amazement and horror spied the great black snake
slowly drawing his long coil across my instep! I dared not move, but
gazed down fascinated with the sight of that glistening black
cylindrical body drawn so slowly over my foot. He had come out of the
moat, which was riddled at the sides with rat-holes, and had most
probably been there hunting for rats when my wandering footsteps
disturbed him and sent him home to his den; and making straight for
it, as his way was, he came to my foot, and instead of going round
drew himself over it. After the first spasm of terror I knew I was
perfectly safe, that he would not turn upon me so long as I remained
quiescent, and would presently be gone from sight. And that was my
last sight of him; in vain I watched and waited for him to appear on
many subsequent days: but that last encounter had left in me a sense
of a mysterious being, dangerous on occasion as when attacked or
insulted, and able in some cases to inflict death with a sudden blow,
but harmless and even friendly or beneficent towards those who
regarded it with kindly and reverent feelings in place of hatred. It
is in part the feeling of the Hindoo with regard to the cobra which
inhabits his house and may one day accidently cause his death, but is
not to be persecuted.
Possibly something of that feeling about serpents has survived in me;
but in time, as my curiosity about all wild creatures grew, as I
looked more on them with the naturalist's eyes, the mystery of the
large black snake pressed for an answer. It seemed impossible to
believe that any species of snake of large size and black as jet or
anthracite coal in colour could exist in any inhabited country without
being known, yet no person I interrogated on the subject had ever seen
or heard of such an ophidian. The only conclusion appeared to be that
this snake was the sole one of its kind in the land. Eventually I
heard of the phenomenon of melanism in animals, less rare in snakes
perhaps than in animals of other classes, and I was satisfied that the
problem was partly solved. My serpent was a black individual of a
species of some other colour. But it was not one of our common
species-not one of those I knew. It was not a thick blunt-bodied
serpent like our venomous pit-viper, our largest snake, and though in
shape it conformed to our two common harmless species it was twice as
big as the biggest specimens I had ever seen of them. Then I recalled
that two years before my discovery of the black snake, our house had
been visited by a large unknown snake which measured two or three
inches over six feet and was similar in form to my black serpent. The
colour of this strange and unwelcome visitor was a pale greenish grey,
with numerous dull black mottlings and small spots. The story of its
appearance is perhaps worth giving.
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.
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