"Try this one", the African native said as he brushed sand away from the entrance of an animal's burrow.
His partner dropped a canvas bag from his shoulder and pulled a long piece of cloth from it.
He then sat on the ground while wrapping his foot and leg in a cocoon of cloth.
When the leg was entirely wrapped, he slid it into the hole.
Within minutes his leg flinched and he yelled, "He took!" After ten minutes the old man became restless and began to drip with sweat.
"Now, now" he yelled.
His partner grabbed him by the arms and tried to drag him out of the hole.
The old man seemed overly heavy as his buddy struggled to obtain his footing on the loose ground.
After getting a good foothold, he pulled the old man out of the hole to expose a giant python trying to eat his leg.
The snake had swallowed his entire leg up to the middle of his thigh.
The snake was over eighteen-foot long and weighed 150 lbs.
As it thrashed around, the old man spread his arms out on the sand to keep his balance.
His partner wrestled the snake's body into the canvas bag, and then began to pry the pythons jaws open with his hands.
With the snake's jaws held wide open the old man pointed his toes and slowly worked his leg out of the snake's mouth.
That was the seventh snake the old man captured that summer and he never got a scratch.
As long as he wraps enough cloth around his leg, the snake's teeth never cut him.
People get woozy and cringe when I tell that story..
Oh my god, I'd rather die, most say.
But snakes do not have to engulf a body part to invoke terror within us.
Their mere presence is enough to send the most macho of men atop a chair holding his "skirt".
Snakes have permeated the subconscious.
They unwillingly breed fear and hatred as the overactive human imagination transforms them into a far more evil supernatural being, the mythical serpent.
While lecturing at thousands of schools, I have closely studied human reactions towards snakes.
As I reach the segment of my lecture where I discuss snakes, I say,.
Raise your hands if you like snakes..
Their reactions are very predictable.
Most of the children raise their hands with great excitement, and all but a few teachers sit with their hands by their sides while bearing the facial expression of wearing a dirty diaper.
These two different reactions made me conclude that humans must be introduced to snakes as a young child in order to comfortably accept them.
Otherwise, there will almost always be some sort of apprehension in the adult.
Most people gravitate toward specific animals because they are cute, cuddly, or resemble us.
A snake is none of the above.
There is nothing human-like about a snake.
They lack arms and legs, yet they mysteriously propel their bodies with great speed and stealth.
We rely so much on our legs and arms to exist that it is hard for us to relate to a seemingly "lower" creature that gets along perfectly without them.
Snakes do not have moveable eyelids, so they always seem to be staring at you.
Many animals, besides humans, have a natural aversion to being stared at; it is considered a threat.
Their unique physical features mixed with centuries of myth and religious belief has given snakes the hard task in winning an adult's compassion.
Children have the better reaction because they are in a discovery stage of life and greet the unfamiliar.
So if given the opportunity to interact with snakes, children respond much better than adults.
The only time the majority of children did not raise their hands in favor of snakes occurs when I lecture within our nation's large cities.
Many of these children come from generations of city dwellers and are so far removed from the natural world that they view a wild animal as an alien.
Most of their ancestors had never been exposed to snakes which caused this irrational fear to be passed down through the generations.
I was introduced to snakes at the age of six, but with much resistance from my mother.
My quest for a snake began in an odd way.
I was playing in my backyard when I saw something run underneath my neighbor's car.
I slowly crept over to the car and peeked beneath; it was a mouse.
I crawled underneath the car and found a mouse staring at me and shaking in fear; it had a broken leg.
"Well, I must fix your leg.
" I said to the mouse as I reached out to grab it.
I managed to corner her against a tire and grab her around the waist.
As I heard a high pitched squeak, she sank her teeth into my thumb.
Still determined to help her as she chewed on me, I ran into the house looking for a bucket.
After several shakes of my hand, she let go and dropped into the bucket.
Proud of my capture I yelled, "Mom!, look what I caught, it bit me; can I keep it?" I then quickly learned that there are two things you can not say to your mother in the same sentence, "it bit me" and "can I keep it?" While she frantically cleaned my wound she said, "Absolutely not!" "Well if I can't have a mouse then I want a snake!" I yelled.
My mother did not want me to have a snake.
But she also did not want to hear me pester her about not having one.
She replied.
If you find a snake, remember where it is, go get your dad to check it out, and if it's not poisonous you can keep it..
I thought it was a great idea when I was six years old, but years later I realized what she was up to.
First of all, it was almost wintertime and she knew I would never find a snake during a cold New York winter.
Second, if for some weird reason I did find a snake, it would probably be gone by the time I got my dad.
But it backfired on her, she forgot about two things; a six-year old never forgets, and pet shops.
About two months later my parents took me to a pet shop to buy a goldfish for my sister.
When I walked into the store I saw an aquarium against the back wall with snakes.
Being the good boy I always was, I did what I was told.
I remember where they were, and yelled, "Mom, there's some snakes, there's dad, and they're not poisonous".
With my mom's head spinning, we left with a snake and lots of goldfish to feed the snake.
It was a garter snake.
I really wanted a king cobra, but I settled.
After many years, "Sam the snake" could have been found sleeping in my shirt, going to school, or roaming my bedroom.
Unfortunately, our time together was cut short after he made one too many unauthorized expeditions though our house and my mother took him for a walk in the woods.
Only one of them returned.
Sam was my first recollection of interacting with something that was so different than I was, yet just as perfect I thought.
My first experiences with Sam made me more open towards the different and unusual, and always having a few snakes around the house helps remind me to continue to do so.
Snakes are truly harmless animals if left alone and given their space, when not, most are still rather tolerant of humans.
Whenever I have ended up meeting the "sharp end" of a snake, I deserved it.
I have witnessed two behaviors while approaching wild snakes.
They either lie still and try to blend with their surroundings or they speed away.
Whenever they slithered right towards me, it was not an attack.
The logical explanation is that while searching for prey an inch or two off the ground, the snake most likely did not even realize I was there.
A snake senses are just as unique as their body shape.
They have no ears, yet they are not deaf.
They detect vibrations from the ground through their lower jawbone which then transfers the vibrations to the small ear bone.
These vibrations can tell a snake if another animal is large or small, and if it is coming toward them or going away from them.
Snakes feel sound instead of hearing it.
So a snake charmer's cobra never hears the flute playing, it just follows the motion as the charmer moves it.
A snake's sense of smell is also different than ours.
Snakes taste the air rather than smell it.
When a snake investigates its surroundings, it flicks its forked tongue into the air picking up minute chemical particles.
The snake then quickly draws its tongue back into its mouth and presses the tip into two openings in the roof of the mouth called the Jacobson's organ.
Here tastes and smells are analyzed informing the snake about any nearby predators, prey, or mate.
Since snakes hide easily and detect their surroundings much differently than we do, accidents and unfortunate situations do occur.
According to Professor Janis Rose, author of Coral Snakes of the Americas, the first casualty of the American Civil War was not as a result of war, but by the bite of an eastern coral snake.
A snake in a bush camp I stayed at in Zimbabwe killed a man.
It was a rainy night and two men were sharing a tent.
One of the men got out of the tent and forgot to zip the tent's door closed behind him.
While outside a puff adder slid into the tent to dry off from the rain.
After the man returned to the tent and fell back to sleep, the puff adder slithered over his hand and woke him up.
Startled, the man jerked his hand which flung the snake across the tent.
The notoriously fast Puff Adder managed to bite the man twice in the back of the hand as it was flung.
To add insult to injury, the peacefully sleeping man the snake landed on received a bite to his leg.
The man bitten in the hand died from a direct injection into a vein and the man bitten in the leg received a smaller dose of venom since most of it had been injected into his friend.
He lived after being picked up by a rescue chopper and spent a few weeks in a hospital.
Always zip up your tent! Knock on wood, I have only had a couple close calls with poisonous snakes.
The most memorable one was a cobra that struck at my leg and got its fangs caught in my pants leg.
As it attempted to inject its venom, I felt it pour down the side of my leg and quickly soaked my pants.
It happened because I was not paying proper attention to what I was doing.
I now understand why my school report cards always displayed the comment "easily distracted".
But the "Award for Good Luck" should go to a colleague of mine.
While he was giving a lecture about rattlesnakes, he was holding a rattler.
The snake became startled by an unruly child in the audience and struck at my friend, biting him in the chest.
Surprised he did not feel any pain; he looked down at his chest and realized the snake unloaded a lethal dose of venom into a pack of cigarettes he had in his shirt pocket.
The venom drenched cigarette pack saved him from a direct bite to the heart which would have guaranteed instant death.
He is the only person I know that can say cigarettes saved his life.
I think now he will never quit smoking.
But in general, unprovoked attacks are extremely rare, and snakes account for very few human fatalities, only 10 to 15 people a year in the U.
S.
The vast majority of cases of snakes biting humans involve the abuse of alcohol.
Hmm, wonder which of the two is doing the drinking?