The other species, the Burrowing boa, is fossorial and to find this one had to dig hopefully, like a pig in an oak wood, into the shallow area of earth trapped round the base of each palm. On the face of it, this too should have proved easy but it was not, for the dead leaves of the Latania, though they turned brown and fell earthwards, still remained attached by their stalks to the parent tree; thus they formed a sort of resilient brown tent of fan-shaped leaves round the base of each tree, and these had to be moved aside before one could grub in the earth they concealed. To say that this was thirst- and sweat-provoking work was an understatement; you were bathed in perspiration and yet your body glowed with heat, and your tongue appeared to have taken up residence in a cave composed of very old and very dry chamois leather. The tuff grew so hot that you could have coddled an egg on it. From above, the heat hit you like a physical blow, while it rebounded from the tuff, and hit you in the face with a blast like opening a foundry oven. We lost more moisture in sweat walking a hundred yards than one would have thought the body could contain.
The exhausting part was that you were never on the level. Either you were straining your muscles to climb uphill, or straining them against the downward slope. Even when you walked in a straight line, you felt you were walking with one leg shorter than the other. We searched for two hours and then sat down to have a much-needed drink and an orange apiece. We found, as we got more used to hunting on Round Island, that oranges were better value to take with you than the heavy bottles of water, for they provided you with moisture as well as food, and left your clogged mouth feeling clean.
By now, the sun had crept up and peered over the carapace of the island, glowering down at us like the monstrous red-hot eye of some giant dragon. We knew that it would soon be really too hot to continue our search. We moved downhill some fifty feet and started back to camp, searching as we went. I parted the leaves of a Latania for what seemed like the thousandth time, and saw the tail of what I thought was a Telfair’s skink. I was about to move along to the next palm, when I thought I had better make sure it was a Telfair’s. I had a brief struggle with the leaves and shifted my vantage point.
It was not a Telfair’s but a fully-grown and very beautiful Round Island boa, which lay coiled around the Latania stems where the bases formed a sort of cup round the palm’s trunk. From my viewpoint, I could see him lying there, languid and unafraid. The only portion of him I could catch hold of was the extreme end of his tail. This struck me as being a bad policy from every point of view. For one thing the tail was slender and, although unlikely to snap, could bruise more easily than the rest of his length. For another, if I grabbed him by the tail, he might bite me. This was no problem as far as I was concerned, as his mouth was tiny, but I did not want to risk breaking off some of his fish-bone-like teeth in my hand, which could then easily lead to his getting canker of the mouth. He was too valuable to risk anything like that. So, rather than move my position and risk disturbing him and maybe losing my find I called John who was upside down, like a dabbling duck, in the depths of the Latania farther down the hill.
‘John,’ I shouted, ‘I’ve got a snake here, come and give a hand.’ He emerged, scratched, tousled and perspiring, his spectacles misted over, from the depths of his palm. He wiped his brow.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m too busy with the one hundred and fifty I’ve got here.’
‘Don’t be a nincompoop,’ I said. ‘I’m not joking.’
‘Seriously?’ said John, and then he ran towards me, stumbling and slipping on the tuff, and arrived panting.
‘Go round to the other side of the palm and grab him,’ I instructed. ‘That’s where his head is. And don’t let him bite you, I don’t want him to get canker of the mouth.’
With me acting as the rear guard, John parted the fronds, found out where the snake’s head was deployed, and then simply inserted a long arm, picked him up by the back of the neck, gently disentangled him from the Latania leaves, and drew him out.
He was about three feet long; basically a pale olive-green colour, with a speckling of dull yellow towards the tail. The head was long and narrow, almost leaf-shaped. Altogether, he did not look very boa-like.
To say that we were exuberant was an understatement. To have captured one of the rarest snakes in the world in such difficult terrain, after only a two-hour search, was incredible; to have captured it, as it were, with its full co-operation, was even more extraordinary. We went back to our hunting with redoubled zeal. However, the sun rose higher and higher, and grew hotter and hotter, and the Latanias seemed tougher and tougher to wrestle with, so eventually we went back to camp and the luxury of fresh coconut milk, water melon, and camp beds that bucked like unbroken horses on the uneven terrain. In what we referred to, with some sarcasm, as the cool of the evening, when the temperature had dropped to a mere 85°F and you could sit on the exposed tuff without burning yourself, we did another sweep through the Latanias, but with no success. That night, it rained and the water poured down the sheets of tuff and through our tent so that, lying in our camp beds, it felt as if one were afloat on one of the less salubrious canals of Venice.
We were up before sunrise and just as the sky was turning greeny gold, we made our first sweep through the palm belt. I was much cooler that morning, for there had been a stiff breeze blowing, flecking the blue sea with white petals of foam and drawing great, flat flotillas of cloud across the sky which frequently masked the sun and gave us a few minutes’ respite. We searched for three hours but although we saw lots of lizards, there were no snakes. When we stopped for a rest and an orange, John expounded a theory.
‘You know, there is plenty for them to eat,’ he said.
‘I’ve seen no end of green geckos and baby skinks, which make ideal food.’
‘There is certainly no shortage of food,’ I said.
‘Well, why are they so rare?’ persisted John.
‘Probably because they find it so hard to find each other in these damn Latanias,’ I said bitterly.
‘I think it’s because they are preyed upon when they are young.’
‘Preyed upon? What by?’
‘Telfair’s skinks. I’ve been watching the big ones and you know they eat anything from chewing gum to orange peel. Well,
I saw a Telfair’s just now, eating quite a large Bojeri skink. The snakes can’t be all that big when they are born. A fully-grown Telfair’s is a formidable beast, and they are everywhere.’ ‘You’re probably right, it hadn’t occurred to me.’
‘In fact,’ said John, ‘to help the snake in its wild state, it might be necessary to catch up four or five hundred Telfair’s and transport them to Gunner’s Quoin or Flat Island.’
‘Now you are going too far,’ I said, hopefully burying my orange pips in some loose tuff. ‘You know there are two things that make all conservationists as hysterical as maiden aunts when they are suggested. One is captive breeding and the other is translocation of species.’