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Be prepared
"Be prepared! That's the Boy Scout's marching song,
Be prepared! As through life you march along.
Be prepared to hold your liquor pretty well,
Don't write naughty words on walls if you can't spell.
Be prepared! To hide that pack of cigarettes,
Don't make book if you cannot cover bets.
Keep those reefers hidden where you're sure
That they will not be found
And be careful not to smoke them
When the scoutmaster's around
For he only will insist that it be shared.
Be prepared!"
- Tom Lehrer
Okay, so I've never been a Boy Scout (or a Girl Scout either), but I have to admit that that was some pretty good advice.
I really should have taken this lesson to heart the time I went camping with my boyfriend and we didn't have enough water left to put out our cozy little fire. He did however have to attend to some bodily needs. We thought that this would be a perfect solution to the problem. It wasn't.
The lovely, wispy, romantic night mist beneath the trees was quickly replaced by a thick warm cloud of entirely different character. It hung around our tent for hours, like an unwelcome relative who drops in for dinner and clearly intends to stay the night. I think I managed to choke out something like "oh my god, it's a real pee soup fog". It was even funny until we had to stumble away and gasp desperately for fresh air.
Ever had to move your tent in the middle of the night after you've misplaced the manual somewhere in the dark? The kind with about a million complicated little folding sticks and winding loops and six different kinds of peg holes you have to stick exactly the right little pieces through or else the tent will fall down? While mosquitoes roughly the size of small commercial aircraft are dive bombing around your ears? Well there you are. It's definitely better to be prepared.
Okay, so now I know better than to whizzen on the campfire. But I don't go camping every day, so it's not like I have time to form any serious bad habits. Playing with snakes is a different story. I do it so often that it's much too easy to be casual about it, and casual is just a step away from careless. Which I think we can all agree is Not A Good Thing.
Catching king cobras is easy, right? I do it all the time. No big deal. Basic safety protocols. Hook'em into the safety bin, grab the tail end to deliver a quick injection, tong and tube'em for oral meds or assist feeding, scoop'em up in the Pro Bagger for easy transport. I get the front end, handling buddy gets the back end, easy as pie.
So if it's so easy, I can afford to cut a few corners, right? Sure, why not. Here's this nice freshly wild caught 12' king that needs to go into a bag for transport to a venom lab down the road. Oops, nobody around to help me handle it. No big deal, all I have to do is stuff it in a bag, not like it needs any more medication today. It's easy to put a king cobra in a Pro Bagger, practically no work at all.
No wait, if I use the Pro Bagger that might be inconvenient. I might not get my bag back right away. Sometimes there is nobody at the venom lab available to put the snake away and I have to leave the bag. Better just to grab a large pillowcase and stuff the snake into it.....alone....while wearing open toed sandals and shorts. Okay, sure, fine. Nothing wrong with this picture. One hand on neck, one hand on tail, stuff the snake parts in between into the pillowcase which is being held open across the garbage can by a small wire frame. No problemo.
Time to catch the snake. How about the good old tong and tube technique? Always works great with an assistant as a fast, gentle and effective restraint method. Except that I didn't have one hand to operate the tongs, one hand to wield the tube and a third hand to make the catch. This bad boy just wasn't staying still for the tube without the tongs, so I gave up and nabbed him behind the head when he wasn't looking. Getting hold of the snake was easy, but then the real fun began.
A 12' king cobra, in case anyone other than my idiot self has forgot, has some major muscle to back up its bad temper at being grabbed. His business end was safely out of commission in my left hand, but that left quite a lot of snake to express its displeasure at being caught. I reached for a thrashing bit of tail and prepared to start stuffing cobra.
I quickly discovered that I really, really needed that other hand much closer to the neck to keep my hold on the all important sharp pointy end stabilized. "Oh yeah," I reminded myself belatedly. "That's the way it works with big kings. Duh." A fairly good rule with kings is one firm grip for every three or four feet of snake to restrain an unhappy animal that is doing its vigorous best to object to your handling. No, I knew that. Really. Oops.
As I mentioned earlier, I am not the living avatar of a Hindu goddess and I have only the standard number of appendages. This meant I was slightly short on hands. I briefly considered praying to Kali to become such an avatar, but figured that this would probably not be nearly as effective as just trying to stuff the damn snake into the bag anyway. Besides, if Kali did grant my wish, I'd never be able to wear my SHHS t-shirt without cutting extra holes down the middle. So, forget any help from that pantheon. On with the cobra stuffing.
If I ever get rich, I'm gonna fund a study to find out how king cobras can see out of their rear ends. The first thing he did with his tail was to knock down the wire frame so that the pillowcase crumpled impotently on the bottom of the garbage can. The second thing he did with his tail was to tie most of his body in pretzel knots around my leg. The third thing he did with his tail was to carefully feel his way into my shoe and take a big, wet, juicy dump in there.
So I am standing precariously on one foot with a shoe full of cobra poo, holding a very unhappy snake who has my leg in bondage from knee to toes. I managed to shake off the abused shoe with some unsolicited help from his tail. Then I patiently took the shoe away from him and un-pretzeled him from my leg. The pillowcase was retrieved and the stuffing commenced.
Ever try stuffing 10 pounds of sausage into a 5 pound casing? That would accurately describe the subsequent wrestling match between the 5 foot tall one shoed woman and the 12 foot long angry king cobra. That pillowcase seemed big enough when I'd picked it up off the clean laundry pile. But like a six foot rattlesnake being reported by a police officer who looks like Burt Reynolds and is having hysterics like Tammy Faye Bakker, it shrank a lot when I looked at it.
This was about the time that the lightbulb went on in my head, right over the "Congratulations! You've Been A Total F****ing Moron!" sign. There is nothing like a shoe full of cobra crap to remind you that perhaps the decisions you made that brought you to this point were not really great ones.
I thought about letting the snake go and recapturing it once I was a little better prepared. Fresh shoes would have been a pretty good start, and my Pro Bagger was starting to look a lot like the Holy Grail. I calculated the amount of space I had to work in. Then I thought about where this snake would probably go and what it would probably do if it I put it down long enough to go get the bagger. I decided to keep wrestling.
Finally I managed to stuff the cobra down faster than he could wiggle back up. If it is possible to slam a pillowcase shut I did just that. A few quick twists and a zip tie and he was safely bagged. Total time elapsed by the clock, maybe five minutes. Total time elapsed subjectively inside my not very bright head, at least a year long television miniseries.
So what happened here? Basically I cut a few corners too many on one job. I could have done without the Pro Bagger if I had an assistant. I could have done without the assistant if I had used the Pro Bagger, or if I had set up a much larger pillowcase more securely on the garbage can. I just plain got too casual about sticking a big cobra in a bag. I did not take enough time to think and plan ahead about what I would need to get the job done safely with minimum stress to the animal.
I'm mad at myself because I put the snake at higher risk of injury. I wasn't worried about me. My grip was good and I wasn't letting go. I was worried that I might end up in the position of having to choose between releasing my grip at a bad time and hurting the snake. It was fairly close to that a time or two, which is why my other hand was pretty much fully occupied keeping the animal's neck straightened and stablilized to avoid injury to the delicate cervical structures.
This entire fiasco could have been prevented if I had just taken a moment to think harder about what I was doing and to double check the security of my bagging setup instead of just casually tossing some equipment down that I knew worked fine for mambas and smaller kings. That was stupid. I deserve the moron award for the day.
Oh wait, I already got one. It's a shoe full of cobra crap.
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Well written and funny!
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