Black Mamba

Yesterday evening, when I was busy baking pyrite at 650 degrees Celsius, Hans and Jaco went down to the Pongola River to do some fishing. This morning Hans informed me that while Jaco went fishing, Hans was chasing down warthogs (with a gun of course), which apparently arrive in droves after nightfall at the riverbank. The immediate area is actually engaged in a province-ordered cull of both warthogs and bush pigs which have been devastating the local farmers crops as of late.

As Hans was walking back towards the mine (some 300 meters above along a winding dirt road), he came across a rat that scampered out of the shrubbery, over the road, and disappeared into the bush on the other side. Then, following the rat closely, a large snake slithered into Hans' headlamp beam. Turns out it was a Black Mamba, the undisputed deadliest snake in the world. As Hans tells the story, the snake stopped in the middle of the road, turned and looked at Hans as he raised his gun, trembling with fear. The stand-off apparently lasted only a few seconds and the mamba continued into the bush in pursuit of the rat.

This is only the second black mamba sighting in the area since the mine was recommissioned back in June, but it proves that there are a few of them in the area. The good news is that form what I've heard, mambas are just as scared of people as we are of them, so if you make lots of noise while walking through the bush, the mambas will tend to go away long before you reach them. The only thing one must be careful about is if the situation arises where a mamba feels cornered, which is when they become aggressive. And apparently they can easily outrun humans, so that kind of sucks. Of course, Hans' solution is to carry a gun. They make special shotgun rounds called 'snake shots' designed as a lethal spray-shot for large snakes such as the mamba. So if I'm ever mapping out in the bush here in the future, I will definitely insist on one of those. Fortunately my duties now have been limited to mostly the plant and underground.

In other less dangerous news, it took me this long to figure out the 'Klip-wal' is Afrikaans for Stone-ridge or Stone-wall. It makes sense, as the boss' new company name is "Stonewall Mining".