Some humanitarian aid workers and I were in a seventeen-passenger bus. We were in Kenya, traveling on a dirt road across the Tsavo Game Reserve. Suddenly the driver stopped, shifted into reverse, and backed up.

“What’s wrong?” we asked.

“There’s a cobra in the road,” he said.

We gathered at the front of the bus and peered through the windshield. Sure enough, there was a large snake lying absolutely still in the middle of the road. We waited for it to slither away, or perhaps rear up, flatten its hood, and hiss at us like in the movies, but nothing happened.

We got out and formed a large circle around it.

As the minutes went by and our curiosity increased, the circle slowly began to shrink. Soon, we were standing in a ring no more than six feet away from one of the deadliest snakes in the world.

“Do you suppose it’s dead?” someone asked.

“Of course it’s dead,” I said. “If it were alive, it wouldn’t just be lying there like that.”

I had on my belt a razor sharp Gerber bolt action knife. I took it out and opened it one-handed. The knife made a satisfying click as the blade locked into place.

“In fact,” I said, “I’m going to cut off its head and skin it.”

Everyone in the circle took a step backwards.

I must tell you that I was somewhat misinformed as to the actions of cobras. When endangered or angry, they do indeed rear up and give a warning. When startled, however, their reaction differs quite dramatically from Hollywood cobras. Timothy Corfield, in his book The Wilderness Guardian, says, “Treat all snakes as venomous, and even if they look dead, regard them as alive. Many species, especially the cobras, feign death when disturbed.”

In the medical section of his book, Corfield says that in the case of a penetrating bite by a large cobra, if antivenin is more than three or four hours away, “to take no action is to face almost certain death.”

A tourniquet should be placed five or six inches above the bite and the wound cut open. Corfield says don’t waste time sterilizing the blade because seconds saved could be the difference between living and dying.

I picked up a stick, walked over to the cobra, put the stick on its neck, and put my foot on the stick. Then I bent over with the knife.

The fact that I am writing this is attributable to one thing only: that the cobra had the good sense to have actually been dead. What it had died of, we had no idea. I cut off its head and used the stick to flick the head into some roadside bushes. I skinned it, planning to give the skin to someone who knew how to preserve it.

It wasn’t until later that I read Corfield’s book and added the cobra incident to the list of stupid things I’ve done. To this day, it still ranks in the top five.