christmas eve

So this is how it happened. It's shortly after lunch. It's rained a bit in the morning. My son and Audrey are in the back garden. Mai Agnes and Tommy are drinking tea. Audrey moves towards the banana grove. (Is she going to wash a plate at the nearby tap?).

"Snake," she shouts.

Tommy jumps up, seizes his catapult. The snake, a long grey thing, slithers quickly across the wet grass (snakes do not like clear open pieces of land) to the daisy patch by the washing line. There's a young tree there, a custard apple. Tommy fires stones at the snake as it slithers into the branches.

This is an aggressive snake. Which means only one of two kinds.

Mai Agnes calls the dogs, our semi-Rottweilers. One of them (the older, greying round the muzzle, probably not too much longer for this world anyway) stays well away. The other, two years old, not much more than a puppy in manner though bigger than either of the children, sees the stone-throwing, thinks this is some kind of a game. She rushes towards the snake. There is a yelp. Tommy beats the snake to death on its head.

My son comes running inside. My husband's in his office. I'm on the bed, still trying to shake off tick-bite fever and pneumonia (and no, I don't have heart problems, the Diagnostic Heart Centre confirmed this week).

"Daddy, Daddy, Tommy's killed a big snake." He goes to see what's happened, sees the snake still writhing. It is black inside its mouth.

"You've killed a mamba, Tommy," my husband says admiringly. Black mambas: one of the most deadly snakes in Zimbabwe. Green mambas are bad too, and pythons might take a small child. No-one mentions the dog.

A few minutes later - no more than five surely -- when my husband's back in his study, I decide to go to see for myself. My son is already sketching the dead snake, his piece of torn-out diary paper lodged on an upturned cardboard box.

"This is a bad snake, Mai Agnes," I say with a shudder. I did not know there were black mambas in town.

"Yes, but not too bad. It bit Wubie, but she's alright."

Bit the dog? I turn to look at her. She's drooling. She is definitely not alright. I run screaming into the house. "The snake got her, the snake got her." My husband scoops her up (as far as you can scoop up a heavy semi-Rottweiler). Frantically I 'phone the vet. No answer, but the surgery is only five minutes down the road.

I 'phone my in-laws. The children jump on the pushbikes, scoot happily across the verandah. I hope for the best. The bakkie drives back in through the gate 20 minutes later. "She's gone," says Tommy. The vet tried. He put in drips, injected her with anti-venom. It was too late. Twenty minutes from bite to death. And my child and Audrey were two metres from that snake.

We bury her in the garden, beyond the banana trees, metres from the fence where she loved to annoy the dogs next door. My son (four still, how can he understand?) puts a bunch of daisies and frangipani on top of the pile of earth. He does it carefully and solemnly, making a little hole to lodge the bunch in, as if he were planting a tree. His feet sink into the freshly-turned red clay.

In the drizzle, we turn away.