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Baboon Fights
Security walked by. “I chased away the baboons over there,” I said to him. But at that moment he wasn’t interested in baboons that I had chased away from the nearby tents. “Something just happened to me…” he started. He needed someone to talk. “As I walked past the back of the ablution block, a snake fell out of the tree, right next to me.”„Als ich hinten an dem Toilettenhäuschen vorbei ging, fiel eine Schlange aus dem Baum, direkt neben mich.“ Black people are often terrified of snakes. He was terrified. I asked what the snake had looked like. Very long and thin, black, with light stripes. “Maybe a black mamba?” he asked himself. Mambas are among the most dangerous snakes of all, and it would be irresponsible to have such snakes in the camp. But the stripes spoke against it. I asked him, “Were the stripes lengthwise or crosswise?” ”Lengthwise.” Then it was probably a whip snake, a beneficial animal (like all snakes) and harmless to humans. It calmed him down a little bit. I fetched our two snake books, and we studied the pictures. The black mamba is not striped. Yeah, it could have been the whipsnake. “But you do get scared when you meet a snake,” I said to him. He promised that he would make sure that the snake would not scare any unsuspecting tourists. From now on we took a closer look at the corners of our ablution block.

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