SNAKE CUT

A story about overcoming fear of snakes at Kabawer Ranch, Guyana using alchemy.

 

Snake Cut vial

        

 

"Snake! Snake!” - The children scattered. The high octave warning would do that. It caused our eyes to dart left and right, hearts pumping loudly against eardrums as the adrenalin surged. That startling call was able to interrupt us even when we were making much louder noises with our calcium carbide-mixed-with-spittle and shaken-in-an Ovaltine tin bombs. Come to think of it what a nice, long winded name for those ‘harmless’ bombs.

“Snake! Snake!” The alarm call would ring! Stay and get closer for a glimpse as it slithered on its menacing way? Or should I trust the others to keep it in sight, run for the cutlass and be the one to make the heroic kill?

Chop! Chop! The bomb making would have to wait. You see, not a single snake was ever allowed to get away. After all, wasn’t it a well-known fact that all snakes were out to do only one thing? Snakes in Queen Street, Kitty Village were poisonous, every last one of them! Viper or no viper! That’s what they were and they remained so until they were dead, dead and couldn’t bite you. Each and every Kitty snake was within reach of a cutlass chop. “Chop! Chop! Chop iittt!” The unanimous chorus could be heard almost to the end of Queen Street.

“Is it poisonous?”

“Kill it and see! Better safe than sorry!”

“A bite is truly a horrible fate! Remember how poor ‘little Ali’ met his grave?”

That is how it was with snakes as I grew up in Kitty during the 1960s and 1970s. The village was the first one  of many East of the capital of British Guiana , Georgetown. It sat some six feet below the tropical Atlantic on the North coast of South America. Soon the country would become Guyana. Those days there was no TV at home or in the whole country for that matter. There were no National Geographic or Discovery channels and so our curious childhood minds were saturated with other matters from other sources. Matters like the ignorant fear of Adam’s mortal enemy. This fear was cultivated in us as a matter-of-fact live or die issue! Much the way preachers would scare the living daylights out of their flock with stories of fire and brimstone. You could smell sulphur I swear. Truly earnest voices, emphasizing words like ‘eternal’ to press home the case. Dante's Inferno? Let me tell you the fear they put in us children was just as real!

Snakes were evil I learnt in and out of church. They resembled the devil and were any good Christian’s enemy. One look at the pictures in my Sunday school book and it was clear what one of them had done to poor Adam and Eve…and poor me  too what with my Mortal Sin! Yes, it was easy to teach us snakes were evil. This was a fact. It was an outright plain and straight fact. 

My family were staunch members of The Holy Rosary parish church on David Street. "Heaven and Hell exist right next door to each other," my mother explained! "Like the top and bottom floor in a house." So, in the middle of the night, it was little wonder I used to have recurring dreams of hellish snakes crawling up into my bed... from somewhere down below. Some nightmares were so realistic I’d wake, jump out of bed and dash, terrified, into the kitchen for the comfort of the cold cutlass blade. It always stood just there by the back door. Many a minute into the night, did the young me sit feeding lucky mosquitoes. It was always awhile before I managed to forfeit the cutlass for bed and the exclusion of the mosquito net. I had a lot of convincing to do to myself that it had been only a dream.

Snakes are prevalent all over Guyana, not only in Kitty or next door Georgetown. This Land was full of them I learned as me and my fear, now almost a phobia, grew older.

“None of our Snakes are man-eaters either!” I heard.

“Except for the camoodie!”

“No, the anaconda you mean!”

Anaconda? Camoodie? No one in Guyana seemed able to tell me the difference between the two. Were camoodies the ones that visited town while the more dangerous sounding anacondas ruled the bush? One thing was certain. They looked exactly the same to me. My Dad comforted me with a recipe on how not to be swallowed by one of them. "Simply press your fingers through the eyes straight into its brain!" He declared. 

Everybody knew camoodies and anacondas and other snakes loved places like sugarcane fields where there were mice and other small creatures to satisfy their sweet tooth. The reason, I was told, why all cane fields were burnt before the cane cutters went in. So fierce were many of those fires, that ash, borne on the Northeast Trade Winds, often sailed out of the eastern sky into Kitty. It was a common place thing that happened at least twice a year.

“They killing snakes!”

“The sugar ripe now!”

“Boy oh boy! I sure could drink some cane juice, couldn’t you?”

Off we’d go to Kitty Market to satisfy our sudden thirst.

There was always a season for the many tasty things that grew in abundance in Guyana. The wind-borne, cane-field debris meant we were properly satisfied we knew what was going on. It was now cane season. Time to drink cane juice!

I grew up before I knew it, and without a second thought, I was giving up my budding teaching career at Saint Stanislaus College for my dream job as supervisor of Kabawer Ranch. Ha! Assistant Ranch Manager! Problem was Kabawer was on the Abary River. This was real (Guiana) rattlesnake and ANACONDA country. I soon discovered I hadn’t forgotten those horrid childhood dreams when I stepped through my back door only to come face to face with a ten-footer green anaconda. It was half way up my back step!

No chop, chop with cutlass this time. I made a hasty retreat into the house for my double barrelled shot gun. Boom! Boom! Roared the weapon that Mr John Dickson of Princess street Edinburgh had made! I had emptied both barrels into the serpent before I knew it. As soon as I was convinced it would no longer swallow me, out came my skinning knife. The big anaconda’s skin was to become my first trophy from Kabawer Ranch. The rest of the snake went into the canal for the piranhas and caimans to squabble over.

“I be curious if yuh nah come across Snake Cut?” My foreman Harry, the leader of the cowboys, asked me shortly afterwards.

“Once yuh gat deh Snake Cut, yuh done deh off limits to any snake!” He declared, spitting into the canal for extra emphasis.

All the other cowboys expected me to have it. Snake Cut was a powerful thing. A promise for a long life. They were all convinced it worked wonders. Anyone who walked on Blairmont’s dams, between the canals or lived further south like us on the Abary River had heard about Cutman and his magical, white powder. It was called Snake Cut. Never mind that none of the cowboys had ever actually seen the mysterious Cutman. Harry might not have known his name but he firmly believed in his medicine.

“What exactly do you do with the Snake Cut, Hugh?” My Georgetown friends asked. “Drink it? Eat it? Smoke it? Put it in bites? Do you just carry it around as a talisman? The questions piled up. Was it made deep in the jungle by them bush Africans in Surinam? A friend, John, had even seen their advertisement sign at the Witches Market over there in Paramaribo, Surinam.

“The best and greatest place for Snake Cut cures this side of the Equator.” It proclaimed.

“No snake can never bite yuh now!” Harry proclaimed as I paid him for my Snake Cut. It was with a deep satisfaction on his weathered face that he handed it over. Almost as if he had just saved my life. Or was it his wonder he was selling his Cut to 'Deep English' speaking me? I was handed a greyish white powder sealed in a medical vial. I was stifling an inward snicker at all this superstition but proceeded as instructed to drink a little of the brittle powder that Harry mixed with pure alcohol spirits. ‘Cutman’ Harry also rubbed some of the mixture between the toes of both my feet. The rest was left in the vial which I was instructed to keep with me on my person always. This I did.

It’s funny and strange how psychology works. Even though I’d had my Snake Cut more to 'fit in’ with Harry and the cowboys rather than sharing their firm belief in its supernatural powers my Snake Cut soon began to work its magic. I evolved from being panicky around snakes to just being wary of them. Was it the Snake Cut alchemy working, or was it just a case of familiarity breeding contempt? Snakes, especially rattlesnakes, were everywhere at Kabawer. Caiman and camoodie fighting to the death was also a common sight.

A month or two later, the Abary River was in flood. We canoed up to a small bit of higher and dry ground. Sure enough, we heard the unmistakably sinister sounds of tails rattling. Within sight there were at least six of them! I felt none of the 'old' familiar panic as they menaced us with their flicking tails and cocked heads. I didn't even kill a single one of them! An unheard of act of mercy from the likes of me and my double barrelled shotgun. But, that was me pre-Snake Cut days. Whatever had happened to my old philosophy about the only good snakes being dead snakes? Did I spare them because they weren't actually on Kabawer Ranch land and thus not a direct danger to our animals? Was my mercy tied to a lack of profit? We got paid good money for snakes killed on the ranch because we were always losing cattle to snake bites. Kabawer rattles were a nice bonus to wages. A note in my expense register from Monday 4th May 1981 said. ‘Ganash Puran - 1 rattle snake, $2.00. Snake box full! Six-hundred rattle snake tails.'

Snake Cut or no Snake Cut, I never stopped being more scared of anacondas than rattlers. In those life-or- death struggles against caimans the results were almost always in the camoodie’s favour. As for the three-meter one I’d blasted away at the bottom of my back stairs? Well, I skinned it, salted it and put it up raw on my living room wall where it stank to high heavens for weeks until it dried. I’m sure I can still smell it even today! I kept this trophy proudly displayed at every ranch I was posted to thereafter. I left it on the wall of Ebini the ranch I left Guyana from. My Snake Cut vial, however got smuggled into the UK then Poland. It  left Guyana with me. So, who’s afraid of snakes? Me? No, certainly not me! I got me Snake Cut,man.

 

Author on Shadow, Ebini Ranch, Guyana 1983.

Hugh Yearwood