The child’s father, tall, lean, but regal in a pair of ragged khaki shorts—his ebony skin shiny with oily beads of perspiration and covered with a number of pinkish-white keloid scars—stood impassively outside the clinic with a hoe in one hand and a dead cobra in the other. The man muttered something about how the snake had killed his cow, how quickly the animal had fallen stone dead. In fact, he seemed more concerned about the dead animal than about his child, which, after all, was only a girl.

Inside the surgery, Sister Doris was already at work on the girl, who had been bitten twice on the left leg. Koestler assumed that the snake had deposited most of its neurotoxic venom in the cow; if the girl had not been bitten second she would have been as dead as the cow, since the snake was large and the girl was small and frail.

Koestler cautiously administered a moderate dose of antivenin, antibiotics, and Demerol for pain. Then he auscultated the child’s chest. Her lungs sounded fine, but since the natives were enamored by hypodermic needles, he gave her a B12 shot—the magic bullet he used on himself to relieve hangovers. Before long the child’s color improved, and only then did Koestler’s thoughts return to Babbitt’s latest caper. It seemed like an event that had happened in the distant past.

Mopping perspiration from his face, Koestler stepped outside and told the girl’s father that his daughter was very strong, that the bite had been one of the worst Koestler had ever seen, and that the daughter was very special to have survived it. Actually, the little girl would probably have survived with no intervention whatever. But to survive a serious snakebite gave the victim unique status among the natives. Koestler hoped the father would now see his child in a new light, and that she would in fact have a better life from here on out. Sister Doris picked up on this and embellished the story until the crowd that had gone to witness Babbitt’s debauchery had gathered outside the surgery to examine the dead snake and catch a glimpse of the young girl who would have unspecified powers and privileges for the rest of her life.