Or more appropriately, the snake killer. . . Sorry for the misdirection, this is a family blog, after all.
Anyway, folks who know me will not find this a huge surprise: I'm terrified of the serpents. Flat-out, wet-my-BVDs, scream-like-a-first-grader scared. Once, when I was backpacking through Nepal, I stopped to check out a snake show in Kathmandu. Being the only white face in the crowd, the wrangler/handler came over to me in search of a donation. I promptly emptied my pockets in the face of the cobra he was handling and vamoosed. And there are plenty of snakes here in Costa Rica. There are non-venomous snakes, and there are a lot of venomous slitherers as well. I don't have an eye for the critters, so every snake elicits a Depends-reaction from me. Lucy is much better, having seen a coral snake (very venomous) and thinking it was really cool.
Kenneth, one of our ace employees here at Tree Houses, stumbled across his fair share of the slitherers in just two days time. Two of the snakes he dispatched of down on the back property, and two were on the hotel grounds. The two that he took care of here near the hotel are of the poisonous variety -- both fer de lance snakes.
If you have the misfortune to get chomped by one of them, or their cousins in the viper family, you have about 2 to 4 hours to get to a hospital. The nearest hospital is only about 20 minutes away, luckily.
This is a small bugger, but I remember reading in junior-high earth science that the small snakes (this is a fer de lance and can get up to 6 feet long) pack the most venom per bite, as they don't know how to control the release of the poison when they chomp on something.
Sooner or later, I'm going to run into a snake and I can only hope that I have the presence of mind to hightail it quickly. Or that the snake is repulsed by the sight/smell/sound of a grown man wetting himself in the jungle.
No comments:
Post a Comment