Last Chance to See

sandy shore, followed the track, and suddenly found himself confronted with something that he, also, didn’t at all like the look of. It appearedto be a great scaly man-eating monster, fully ten feet long. What he was looking at was the thing we are going to look for—the Komodo dragon lizard.”
    “Did he survive?” I asked, going straight for the point.
    “Yes, he did, though his reputation didn’t. He stayed alive for three months, and then was rescued. But when he went home, everyone thought he was mad and nobody believed a word of it.”
    “So were the Komodo dragons the origin of the Chinese dragon myths?”
    “Well, nobody really knows, of course. At least I don’t. But it certainly seems like a possibility. It’s a large creature with scales, it’s a man-eater, and though it doesn’t actually breathe fire, it does have the worst breath of any creature known to man. But there’s something else you should know about the island as well.”
    “What?”
    “Have another beer first.”
    I did.
    “There are,” said Mark, “more poisonous snakes per square metre of ground on Komodo than on any equivalent area on earth.”
    There is in Melbourne a man who probably knows more about poisonous snakes than anyone else on earth. His name is Dr. Struan Sutherland, and he has devoted his entire life to a study of venom.
    “And I’m bored with talking about it,” he said when we went along to see him the next morning, laden with tape recorders and notebooks. “Can’t stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I’ll tell them what to do. Don’t get bitten in the first place. That’s the answer. I’ve had enough of telling people all the time. Hydroponics, now,
that’s
interesting. Talk to you all you like about hydroponics.Fascinating stuff, growing plants artificially in water, very interesting technique. We’ll need to know all about it if we’re going to go to Mars and places. Where did you say you were going?”
    “Komodo.”
    “Well, don’t get bitten, that’s all I can say. And don’t come running to me if you do because you won’t get here in time and anyway I’ve got enough on my plate. Look at this office. Full of poisonous animals all over the place. See this tank? It’s full of fire ants. Venomous little creatures, what are we going to do about them? Anyway, I got some little cakes in case you were hungry. Would you like some little cakes? I can’t remember where I put them. There’s some tea but it’s not very good. Sit down for heaven’s sake.
    “So, you’re going to Komodo. Well, I don’t know why you want to do that, but I suppose you have your reasons. There are fifteen different types of snake on Komodo, and half of them are poisonous. The only potentially deadly ones are the Russell’s viper, the bamboo viper, and the Indian cobra.
    “The Indian cobra is the fifteenth deadliest snake in the world, and all the other fourteen are here in Australia. That’s why it’s so hard for me to find time to get on with my hydroponics, with all these snakes all over the place.
    “And spiders. The most poisonous spider is the Sydney funnel web. We get about five hundred people a year bitten by spiders. A lot of them used to die, so we had to develop an antidote to stop people bothering me with it all the time. Took us years. Then we developed this snake-bite detector kit. Not that you need a kit to tell you when you’ve been bitten by a snake, you usually know, but the kit is something that will detect what type you’ve been bitten by so you can treat it properly.
    “Would you like to see a kit? I’ve got a couple in the venom fridge. Let’s have a look. Ah, look, the cakes are in here too. Quick, have one while they’re still fresh. Fairy cakes, I baked ’em myself.”
    He handed round the snake venom detection kits and his home-baked fairy cakes and retreated back to his desk, where he beamed at us cheerfully from behind his curly beard and bow tie. We admired the kits, which were small, efficient boxes neatly packed with tiny bottles, a pipette, a syringe, and a complicated set of instructions that I wouldn’t want to have to read for the first time in a panic, and then we asked him how many of the snakes he had been bitten by himself.
    “None of ’em,” he said. “Another area of expertise I’ve developed is that of