My India Trip Will be Complete When…

I told Emily a few times that although we had seen so many great things, my trip would really only be complete when I saw a cobra. She always heartily disagreed, but I still wanted the thrill of seeing a killer in its natural habitat.

The other day as we were walking back from lunch one of the other volunteers, Ellie, called me over. “There is a garden snake over here if you want to see it.” Emily doesn’t like snakes and headed up to the room, not too interested. I went over to get a look and didn’t recognize the particular genus of serpent. The general rule around Shunem is to kill any snake you see in case it is venomous. I figured I would get the opinion of a couple older boys before taking action, not wanting to kill a snake that couldn’t harm anyone. When Prabhu and Satish came over they identified it as a king cobra. I wasn’t convinced, but we went of to find some weaponry anyway.

A few minutes later Prabhu, Satish, Ethan, and I gathered around the snake ready to strike. Ethan had found a metal pole, so he took the first pinning  shot. As soon as the pole made contact the cobra’s hood shot out, and it started bearing its fangs and making strikes on our sticks. It was thrilling. I have never seen a snake that dangerous in attack mode, let alone one in attack mode against me. Though it was just over an inch wide and only about five feet long, it was still very threatening.

After a minute or so of doing battle with the creature the four of us walked away unscathed, carrying the twitching corpse outside to be chopped up and burned. You can’t ever be too careful.