The last couple of nights-literally, the last two nights in
a row-we have had visitors straight from the underworld. They appeared to be
targeting the Young family, as their two youngest kids were involved in each
incident. The first night, Liberty mentioned to her family that she had seen a
big snake by the gate that goes into the courtyard of their house. They didn’t
believe her, until they were walking back to their house and Avery almost
stepped on it. She noticed just in time, but its tail still slid over her foot.
They come screaming in to the elephant house so I followed protocol and called
security. Security come over with their big stick and snake boots (mid calf
galoshes like the ones we use to steal from grandpa and wear up while walking
up the little stream that was behind the treehouse), find the snake, then
realized that it was to large for the stick they brought so I am handed a
flashlight and told not to take it off the snake, while they leave to find a
bigger stick. Luckily, it didn’t move at all, but it was kind of intense,
waiting for them to come back because it was dark and the snake was dark and it
was in a grassy area that it could of slithered off just bit and been hidden
pretty well. Then we might have had a nighttime snake hunt, which I have never
witnessed but can say with a surety that it most likely would not have ended
well for both snake or humans.
After a while, security comes back with only a slightly
bigger stick and another man-who was only wearing a lungi for sure, but no shoes
and possibly no shirt. I don’t remember. He could have had a thin tank top on.
He goes out into the grass, sneaking up on the snake while I’m preparing myself
for the possibility that the snake could strike at this man anytime and before
we knew it we could be in a real life episode of “I Survived” (Animal Planet
anyone?) but lucky for us the barefooted lungi wearing man was able to hit the
snake in its head first. And then he hit is again, and again and again. They
brought it out of the grass and I honestly don’t know if it was dead at that
point or if it was just mostly dead and having a lot of end of life/dying
reflexes but it was defiantly still moving some, which was kind of a rush too.
I had no idea how big it was until they laid it out and it was nasty. It was
easily 3.5-4 feet long. We figured out that it was a common krait snake, which
just happens to be the 2nd most poisonous snake in India (just behind cobra)
and the 9th most poisonous snake in the world. No big deal right? I
know we have snakes around us, and we follow certain rules to keep us separated
from them, but inevitably we are going to cross paths sometimes-and it was just
as gross as imagined it would be. Thank heavens it was killed though.
The very next night, a group of volunteers left to go to reading time with the kids in the hostel. Cohan (the youngest Young family member) had been over at the elephant house playing with a few of the boys, and because of said snake incident that night before, was waiting for his parents to come pick him up and walk him back home. He stepped down the stairs in front of the elephant house, and walked around the corner some to see if he could see his Dad coming, and noticed a big black scorpion chilling right in front of the last step. He unknowingly had stepped right over it—which was a good thing obviously, but poor of course there was more panic and another call to security to come save the day-er night. Scorpion’s tails don’t curve up unless they are in defense mode—so I think its safe to say this one was more then just a little pissed in the first picture, and had calmed down some in the second picture. And talk about a crunch. His crunch came from a stick, not a foot but you could almost feel the crunch under your foot by the way it sounded.
Poor Rebecca, she
was understandably been extra nervous the last few days. It didn’t help that we
found out the morning after the snake that there had been another big black scorpion
and common krait snake up by the gate that night as well. The rain draws them
out more—and we had a lot of that lately so I guess that’s good to know. Unfortunately,
I left my rain/snake boots in America though so hopefully, encounters with these
demonic little things doesn’t become a regular occurrence. Hopefully.
