OUR HOME IN AFRICA

MAMBA!

It was the middle of the dry season as Carolyn and I sat in the shade of our thatched roof home reading, trying to escape the oppressive heat.  The nearby Indian ocean was bringing its humid air inland over the savanna adding to our discomfort. The only sound was the cooing of doves.  They sing their song of Africa from sunrise to sunset.  It's always there giving me peace and a feeling of home, like the southern cross does at night.
Our home is a round structure surrounded by a meter high wall with four cardinal openings.  Carolyn was sitting near one of the openings and I at the eating table in the middle of the house.  The floor is hard packed sand and there are reed mats around the perimeter that can be lowered to keep out the rain.

As I drowsily read a paragraph over for the second time, trying to stay awake, Carolyn let out a yell and in one step leaped from her chair to standing beside me.  Instantly awake I jumped up grabbing my double shotgun and found myself face to face with a black mamba.  He had slithered in the entrance under Carolyn's chair and at her reaction raised up a full five feet high.  As I tried to get a shooting angle he dropped back down quickly exiting through another opening in the low wall.  I chased it out side and killed it with a blast of 00 buckshot.  It was nine feet long.

A black mamba's bite is fatal.  Like the cobra they are very aggressive and will pursue an attack.   A bite from a mamba this size with kill the average person in about twenty minutes.  During the time we lived in Mozambique I had to killed many verminous snakes.  This was one of three times one of us came very close to being bitten.
That evening as Carolyn was collecting our clothes off the clothes line she said, "Hey, something has been eating our clothes, they're all full of holes."  When I went out to look I realized that the buckshot had bounced off the hard ground and blown holes in our clothes.  The snake had gotten his revenge.

Kim Warren