I like the feeling of the fingers tickling my back as my brother sings the song. On the last syllable I anticipate the poke. It feels very hard this time, so it probably isn’t his pinkie. I turn around and my brother is facing me with his hands stretched out in front of him towards me. I reach forward and squeeze his middle finger on his right hand, he smiles and yells. That’s ten! I point to more fingers and guess the right one on the fifth try. That’s fifty seconds, ample time for them to hide, maybe I’ll just count very fast.

My mother always says it’s a miracle that we all survived considering how many snakes there were. She makes it sound like we were running over them oblivious of the danger. Perhaps she is right. I remember one time we were playing wegkruipertjie, and I had the unfortunate job of seeking. I walked around the camp searching in trees and in rondawels, stopping every so often to pick diveltjies from my feet. I went into one of the rondawels, the one my parents usually slept in, convinced I would find someone under a bed. Instead when I opened the door a bright yellow Cape Cobra stood with its head up looking directly at me. It was almost as tall as me. I turned away and went to tell my father that I saw a snake in his room. My father then coaxed the snake out, killed it and threw it on the fire. Its body still twisted around and around in the coals.

There are so many snake stories from that time. No one story can ever be told without bringing on a torrent of all the others. Like the time when all the grandchildren slept outside on the lawn in tents. The next morning as my mother cleared out the mattresses and stuffed animals, she found a puffadder curled up in the corner of the tent. An hour earlier we were jumping on the beds and rolling around in the blankets.

Or the time when my grandfather went to pick up a bag of groceries and a cobra spat venom in his eye. I remember my grandmother telling him to wash his eye out with milk.

There was a special glass in the medicine cabinet. It was small, with an ornate stem which curved out to form a shallow bowl. The glass was thick, and the rim was indented in a half moon shape to fit neatly over an eye. One would fill the tiny glass with milk or water, bend over and place it over your eye and then stand upright leaning your head back. As you blinked, your submerged eye would be washed and hopefully healed. Removing the glass without spilling was impossible and you were always left with a wet face. I used that glass to wash my red eyes, stinging from chlorine, after swimming in my grandparents pool the whole day.

Oupa Bannie would often tell the story of when his mother got bitten by a black mamba on the farm. He tied a rope to the top of her leg to stop the flow of blood and then made a cut on her ankle where the bite was. He then pressed his mouth to the wound and sucked out the blood, spitting in the sand. His spit was yellow. She survived with no major injury. At a school camp, an instructor told us that sucking out the venom is a myth and isn’t recommended. I didn’t think he knew what he was talking about.

And of course, years later when I had walked along the road to my parents’ chalet looking up at the sky and felt a sharp burning pain in my foot. I looked down expecting to see a thorn but instead there was a writhing snake. Apparently, I screamed very loudly but I can’t remember doing that. My foot swelled up like it had been stung by a hundred bees, but it cleared up without too much fuss. That night on the way to the hospital my father had tied a rope around the top of my leg and pulled it tight. Keep pulling it tight he said.

Outside our house is a bright yellow sign on the wall beside the automatic gate. Electric fencing, two meters high, sits atop the walls. In the middle of the yellow sign is an angry looking black geometric snake. Bright red letters spell out Cape Cobra Security. I watch a man outside the fence of the house digging through the dustbins. My father is sitting on the couch laughing at a video on his phone. It’s a prank video of a farmer scaring his workers with a dead snake. Nothing scares a boy more than a snake I hear him say. I ignore it and walk away.