Wild life | 13 December 2018

Laikipia, Kenya

‘The End,’ I typed. The book had taken me 14 years to write. I rose from my desk and stretched; outside, go-away birds glowered down from the fever trees and a dust devil coiled across the valley. ‘A walk at last!’ I grabbed my cattle stick — and up leapt the labrador, the collie and Potatoes, the mongrel. In a riot of tails, the dogs rushed out of the open front door with me striding in pursuit and there, on the front porch, I came face to face with an eight-foot long spitting cobra. ‘Look, and be afraid!’ the cobra Nag hisses at Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. But unlike Kipling’s mongoose, on our farm we adore snakes. I lie in bed watching delicate little brown-lipped house snakes in the coconut thatch above, hunting for geckos. Once, on the porch, we found a harmless rhombic egg-eater, with its diamond skin. We have the iridescent-blue grass snake and sand snakes with brown go-faster stripes.