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. For sure we have puff adders. A few weeks ago, a black mamba slithered into the office, rose up and flattened its hood at my wife Claire while she was on the phone before I drove it away with my gumboot — but venomous serpents rarely drop by. Our farm is home to the world’s largest spitting cobra, the giant brown or Naja ashei

Before me was the cobra, rising several feet above the ground, her eyes looking straight into mine

, named for the late but wise Kenyan herpetologist James Ashe. Occasionally an ashei will raid the chicken coop and kill a rooster. Recently a cobra swallowed six eggs from under a broody hen. Luckily we had Charlie staying, a friend who has trained in Ashe’s snake park, and he is a great cobra lover. While I shone a torch, Charlie grabbed the snake out of the coop, secured him by his head — the size of a man’s fist — and then we popped him into one of Claire’s John Lewis pillowcases, knotted this up with an old silk tie of the sort I once wore in cities and put the struggling package in a bucket overnight.