And speaking of snakes..........
This past November I was in Masailand, Tanzania for a 10 day buff hunt with Ridge and Cash Taylor. We had been hunting buff on the Lobo concession and it was hot by the middle of the day so we saw a few snakes. One day late in the hunt we were skirting some buff, trying to get ahead of them to look the herd over for bulls. The bush was thick close to the river and we would move up and look at a few buff then sweep 'em again.
We eased up to a spot with a nice opening about 40 to 50 yards away. We had an acacia on one side and a fig tree on the other for cover. We were intent on looking the buff over and they just began to feed into the opening when our tracker looked up in the fig tree and hissed at us, his eyes as big as saucers. Up in this tree about ten yards from us is a BIG black mamba. We are watching buff with one eye and snake with the other. Probably looked like those damn chameleons in Madagascar!
Well, Lelia can't leave well enough alone and draws his simi (Masai short sword). He whispers to Cash he is gonna piga the mamba with his panga! Translated...throw his panga at the snake!!!!!! so we can watch the buff without having to worry about the snake. We wanted to get the heck away from there but....we also knew Lelia was a hell of a bushman and if he threw his simi at the mamba and cut it in half we would have missed something special. So Lelia rears back and lets fly..only to have his simi deflected and shoot off in the air! That mamba came down the tree faster than you can read this. And it headed right for us. We looked like the damn three stooges trying to get out of there. We screamed and ran into each other, falling down, getting up again...a literal Chinese fire drill. The mamba glides right by us and into a warthog hole! We all stand there grinning and laughing like the criminally insane while the buffalo herd thundered off. We later named that little episode "the mamba mambo".