RD201904

As the thumping of the helicopter

faded, Turin finally gave in to the dark

thoughts she’d been ignoring for the

past three hours. She and my parents

broke into sobs. Bridger didn’t make

a sound. He hadn’t—not a single col-

icky cry—since the bite.

B

ill Hayes keeps a collection of

snakebite kits in a display case

outside his office at Southern

California’s Loma Linda University,

where he is a biology professor and

one of the country’s leading authori-

ties on snakebite treatments. There

are dozens of kits. Some contain ra-

zors to cut the wound and let the

venom leech out. Others have pumps

to suck a bite dry or sulfide to steril-

ize it. That day in Yosemite, we didn’t

have one of these kits, which is prob-

ably just as well. None of them work.

Nor do any of the folk treatments

people still try today, which include

freezing the wound and slathering it

with motor oil.

“Antivenom—that’s the only cure,”

Hayes told me when I went to see him

six months after I was bitten.

Today’s antivenom isn’t so dif-

ferent from what French scientist

Albert Calmette developed in the

1890s while working in Vietnam. When

a flood pushed dozens of cobras into

a nearby village, 40 people were bit-

ten and four died. Calmette, who was

Paramedics loaded me onto

an inflatable backboard so the

helicopter could airlift me out, then wrote

a note for the doctors and nurses. Finally,

three hours after my bite, I was in the air.

3:15 P.M.

106 april 2019