James Mcclure - Snake

The dead reptile was now lying stretched out on its back along the zinc-topped table. Strydom put down his bag and went over to examine the two horny claws just in front of its vent.

“Vestigial hind limbs,” Bose explained, unrolling a canvas holder lined with dissecting instruments. “The family Boidae have a quite recognizable pelvic girdle, which I’ll show you. Males use the claws to stroke the female during courtship- while they seem to have no use for them at all.”

“Hell, I never thought of them as lovers.” Strydom chuckled. In fact, as he realized then, he had lived all his life surrounded by snakes without giving them any thought at all-except, momentarily, while dispatching them with his golf club.

“Nor had I,” said Bose, selecting a large scalpel.

But Strydom’s curiosity had been aroused. “So how come they lost them? I thought legs were a step up the scale, if you get my meaning!”

“Ah, not much good for burrowing. It’s believed that snakes evolved about one and a quarter million years ago from some lizards that took to burrowing, lost the use of their legs, and returned limbless to the surface. There are several other indications of this as well.”

Bose was plainly flattered by an attentive pupil, so Strydom decided this would be a good moment to put a question that might have seemed impertinent before.

“I’ve been wondering, man, why you keep shoving the blame on the girl when how can we be sure that the python didn’t attack her in the first place?”

“Aha, the Tarzan fallacy! Come up this end and take a look at the teeth. Notice how big they are and how they point backward-and now contrast them with the two fangs of this viper here.”

Strydom did that.

“Neither, you have noted, are designed for chewing. Snakes do not chew their food, but swallow it whole. The nearest thing to mastication is found in the eggeater, known hereabouts as Dasypeltis scaber, which has a special downward-pointing projection from its spine that breaks the shell of an engorged meal, allowing it to spit out the bits. But come now-why does the royal have them, do you think?”

There was obviously a catch to this, so Strydom’s reply was grudgingly given. “To bite with?”

“Good.”

“But I’d already thought of that. She must have just been quicker.”

“Quicker than this chap? Contrary to Lord Greystoke’s simian beliefs, constrictors begin like any other snake by striking, not by wrapping themselves around you. The teeth are for holding on, for getting to grips with their prey. Having secured a hold, then they coil themselves around and try, if they can, to keep their tails anchored to a fixed object in order-”

“I know,” said Strydom, “but how hard exactly is the squeeze?”

“Sufficient to cause suffocation by immobilizing the respiratory apparatus. Strangulation may, or may not, come into it, too, but they are certainly not given to crushing anything to a bloody pulp. As pulp fiction would have it!”

Strydom only half heard this afterthought and neglected to smile; he was already anticipating questions from the floor of the conference hall.

“The degree of pressure always interests us,” he said. “There have been cases when in orgasm the human male has inadvertently caused the death of the female with his hands. Can you be more specific?”

“Certainly. If you had a small boa in a figure eight around your wrists, it would seem virtually impossible to disengage yourself and your hands would rapidly swell. And I’m speaking in terms of an averagely powerful man. Living handcuffs.”

“Or a living ligature,” remarked Strydom solemnly, as Bose slit open the python from chin to tail and peeled back the outer layers of muscle.

“Not as putrid as we thought,” the scientist said.

Strydom looked again. Conditioned by years of doing much the same thing to Homo sapiens, he had expected to see the same glossy array of paired organs exposed before him in their God-ordained order.

“You’ve only dealt with frogs, I take it,” Bose said, noticing the lift of the thick bushy eyebrows. “This shape is ideal for digestive purposes, being, to all intents, one long length of gut, but it does make a rather tight fit otherwise.”

“Only one of each?”

“As you say, sometimes only the one. Sometimes they are arranged one behind the other, sometimes the right is much larger and better developed than the left, and, of course, gross elongation comes into it as well. Observe how this lung extends for more than half the length of the body. But let me poke about a bit and see if it was your boy or the young lady in her extremis who did the damage.”

“Most grateful,” said Strydom, now not giving a fig for the time either.

Pedro, the giant tortoise at the Trekkersburg Bird Sanctuary, was said to have shared Napoleon’s exile on the island of St. Helena. He looked as if he’d had a hell of a life. There were splashes of egret dropping almost half an inch thick on his black shell, and his mouth had a permanent downward twist to it.

Kramer knew how he felt. He empathized.

But decided to wake Zondi all the same. So he got out of the Chev, where he had been dozing uneasily, shook down his trousers to ankle length again, and went across to the bench. It was amazing how the little bugger did it-slept like that, out cold, at the drop of his cocky straw hat, even though the new road system had destroyed the value of the place as a quiet retreat during daylight hours.

Kramer picked up the hat and let the sudden blaze of direct sun burn into the eyelids.

“The bench was comfy, boss,” Zondi said, his old self again.

“Uh-huh. And the new car smelled like you said it did.”

“You’re not so good, then?”

“Worse than you think.”

Zondi opened his eyes and sat up. “In what way?” he asked.

“I switched on the radio just now to see if there was anything on the go in Peacevale.”

“ Aikona, no!”

“Relax, all’s quiet. But you know that case Sergeant Marais was handling? With the snake? Prisoner’s gone and killed himself.”

The vertebrae were exposed.

“Neat, hey?” enthused Strydom.

“Complex ball-and-socket joints, articulation at no fewer than five points.”

“No wonder they can twist about.”

“Ah, but within limits,” said Bose, dissecting cautiously. “Each joint can bend through roughly twenty-five degrees from side to side, but only a few degrees vertically. That’s why there are so many of them, like drawing a circle using lots of tiny straight lines. On the vertical axis, it can take only so much of a curve before snapping. Spinal cord gets pinched, spasm follows… Hmmm.”

Strydom craned forward to see better.

“Just a moment, Doctor. We mustn’t nick ourselves.”

Bose excised a section of the spine and placed it under the special light he used for painting-which had the same color temperature, whatever that meant, as the neon strips in the cases.

“Now use the glass yourself,” he said to Strydom, handing it over. “You’ll see the cord has actually been torn apart; not pinched but-”

“Ja, I see-the same as a banger in a Christmas cracker.”

“So that’s your boy exonerated. I had thought, when you said you were hard pushed for space, that he might have overdone things and effected a fracture in that way. But I doubt very much he would have played tug o’ war with it.”

“Oh, no. Not him. He’s a good worker, never fools around.”

“Then we’re back to the unfortunate young woman. She must have had an exceptional pair on her.”

“Hey?”

“To pull-or counterpull-like that. Quite a lengthy battle it must have been, but I think I can provide you with a respectable explanation for your forensic colleagues.”