The Milgis Trust

Category: Health, Northern Frontier District | Date: Jun 20 2009 | By: milgistrust

You may be wondering ‘why the silence’, on my part… No blogs, but this ordeal ‘got’ to me thats for sure!!… Imagine this situation!!… Friday 5th June 9.30 pm, we are at Elkanto.. miles from nowhere.. We were meant be leaving on a dream safari to climb over the Ndoto Mountains… But it wasn’t to be.. Pete Ilsley, my partner and a trustee of the Milgis Trust, had just finished his open air shower, standing there drying his back, when he feels a tap on his leg, and then a second tap… Its full moon, but his leg is in the shadows, and he can’t see what it is, so he finds his torch, thinking it may be a big cricket or something else like that, thats landed on his leg!! Not a man to panic, as sometimes brushing things off your self can be more dangerous…. BUT Ha Ha… It was a five foot copper coloured collared spitting cobra, literally chewing on his leg…

This is a juvenile copper coloured spitting cobra… Not the one that got Pete!

A sight he will never forget!!.. Unbelievably frightening, he hit it hard with his towel twice before he let go… He shouted ‘Helen, Helen I’ve been bitten by a snake… ‘ By this time, I was fast a sleep, I was really tired… but the moment I saw the bite marks I knew there was no more sleep to be had, and that we had to move fast !!.. OUR NIGHT MARE HAD BEGUN!.. The most important thing is not to panic! … I was given some BLACK STONES 25 years ago, by a Belgian guy who came on safari… I have carried them on every single trip since then and never used them!….. So the first thing I did was cut through the bite marks to make them bleed, and stuck the black stone on both bites… Do they work?? We believe they do!! many people are divided, from absolutely NOT, don’t know, and they DO work… We are definitely in the ‘believe in them’ category, after what we went through!!.. All the Samburu ran to help, and we made a decision that we had to get to a hospital, AS QUICK AS POSSIBLE!.. So ten guys picked him up in a blanket, and headed down the mountain side to the vehicle… We wrapped the whole leg in crepe bandages to try to stem the flow of poison to the rest of the body… and we set off… The excruciating pain that followed, was like somebody peeling off his skin, and rubbing salt in… It is only 91.5 kms to Wamba Hospital, but it took us five and a half hours of hell, to get there…there is hardly a road to start with, and the part of the road that exists was badly washed away, in the last rains… Not this year!! Pete was complaining of unbelievable pain in his stomach, which we later found out was the poison [enzymes] literally digesting Pete’s insides… 3 am we eventually arrive and Pete tells me he can taste blood in his mouth… Wamba hospital can take full credit for saving Pete’s life, but it was a battle, also to get the pain under control, and eventually they ‘knocked him out’… Luckily he knew nothing until Sunday morning… But we had a very worrying Saturday…

I am so sad this has happened…I LOVE those snakes.. I have lived side by side with them all these years, why did this one get so angry. It was not cornered, was it chasing a mouse, or looking for water, or just crazy with humans, and all that we are doing to destroy our world?? I was born and brought up living in the bush, I enjoy it so much because it is not possible to get lonely, as there is always something around , be it a lizard, mouse, snake, bird, dikdik, cricket, scorpion, hyena, Genet cat what ever… all the beautiful things that live in the bush, and now I feel let down… Now every one tells me you can not live with snakes??… Two weeks later Pete is doing well.. sounds like hes a snake hater now!!.. and I don’t blame him.. He still has a very swollen foot, and who knows which way it will go, but amazingly no necrosis, which we were warned of… I think that was because of the BLACK STONE!