It's late autumn here in Taiwan, which means chilly, rainy days, but also cloudless periods that can suddenly turn the summer back on again. The nights are very nippy, of course, around the mid-sixties, so the local herpers try to make use of the sunny days as much as possible.
Last Monday, my buddy Bill "Onionsack" Murphy - another Taiwan Lifer and FHF member - and me went hiking in a particularly beautiful forest in Yangmingshan National Park where I'd been spotting
Ptyas dhumnades all summer long.
P. dhumnades, aka "Big-Eyed Ratsnake" or "Knife Crossing the Mountain" in Chinese (alluding to the snake's triangular body cross-section and its fantastic traveling speed), is gifted with very large and powerful peepers, a hefty dose of paranoia, and almost legendary velocity, and the combination of these three elements makes this animal a royal pain to approach. One day in early September my sons and me spotted
seven specimens within two hours along that very trail, but didn't manage to catch even a single one of them. The only encounters with this species that I'd been able to ban on sensor so far involved either
half-dead ones or specimens that
appeared and vamoosed again so quickly that there was no chance for proper photography. Still, we didn't let the frustration grind us down, and so Bill and me headed out onto the trail that sunny Monday in the mad hope that two paunchy middle-aged guys with creaking joints would finally achieve what my two quick and nimble boys hadn't managed all year - catch the Fastest Snake in Asia and take it to the mat for a proper photo session.
But Fate's a fickle mistress, and after our merry little band of Intrepid Old Farts had humped the trails hard for three hours, we hadn't even
seen a snake - any snake! - let alone photographed one. Approaching the parking lot again, we were tired and aching and trying to comfort one another with hollow platitudes such as "Never mind the snakeless day - the scenery and the exercise alone were worth it!" "Yeah, and think of all those poor schlubs slaving in their offices today instead of being here in the glorious mountains!". High fives all around, brave game faces tightly strapped on, the whole typical loser spiel.....
.....and that was when all hell broke loose. From the corner of my eye I saw something long, black and shiny moving rapidly along the inside of the drainage ditch half-concealed behind the wooden poster walls explaining the history of the trail (an old smuggling route). I yelled something primordial and incomprehensible, rushed over, and barely managed to hook the serpent out of the ditch and onto the pavement before it could shift into fourth gear. By that time, Bill had joined me and promptly became the first victim of the enraged reptile that was hissing and lunging and dive-bombing with great, blind furor, in the hope of nailing something -
anything! - which it finally found in the shape of Bill's gym sock-clad ankle. (I still can't quite fathom why the snake didn't meet its maker right then and there - after a three-hour hike, that gym sock had clearly turned into something Chemical Ali would have loved to get his hands on). Instant bedlam ensued: trying to control and keep the furious snake from getting away, we simultaneously attempted to videotape and photograph it, just in case it wouldn't be around for much longer - it was a churning, roiling mess of cameras, tongs, and hooks, all to the foul soundtrack of atrocious cussing in three languages (I think Bill even tried to dig out his high school Latin for a few extra-zesty curlicues).
But then something extraordinary happened: from one second to the next, the snake turned itself, like, OFF. The erstwhile apocalyptic, napalm-breathing monster went into what almost looked like stasis, all in a mere two minutes or so. I've never seen a reptile burn itself out this quickly and intensely. Bill declared it "the cheetah of the reptile world", from zero to sixty mph in a few seconds, but unable to keep up the velocity for longer than a minute.
Now the formidable, but beaten dragon just sat there, panting, immobile, waiting for Fate to do her thing. It was so docile, in fact, that we could even pick it up and do a little show-and-tell for a family of hikers that came along, among them a three-year old little girl. (She badly wanted to touch the snake, but her grandfather told her not to. When I asked him why, he proffered the bizarre explanation "the snake might get infected by human germs". But I've never been good at bacteriology, so I let the girl pet the snake anyway
) The animal was so inert that in the end we actually had to move it by hand back into the ditch....where at last it showed some signs of recovery by disappearing into a hole right away.
What a glorious end to the herping season (which actually might
not be over just yet!)
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Great story!!!
