But, the other day, the question came up yet again when, talking about Africa, my interlocutor fixed me with that familiar anxious look and asked, “But what about snakes?”
Snakes? What snakes? We were talking about living in a tent versus a house with walls and a door, and how sleeping in the open, under the stars, is preferable even to a tent. No snakes involved.
“I thought there were always snakes,” she said. “How do you keep them out of the tents?”
That’s a hard question to answer because it presumes that snakes are always trying to get into tents, surrounding them in the night, slithering about, probing for openings. Such is not, in my experience anyway, the case.
But it brought to mind a tale I
