Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [65]
A fiery pain lanced through my left arm. Startled, I swung on the fly with the flat of my right hand. Used to dealing with flies back home, I failed to put sufficient force behind the blow.
I kid you not. The fly staggered, but remained affixed to my flesh.
It was plain that clearing out the car wasn’t going to be a simple matter of waving at flies. We were engaged in all-out combat.
I struck again, hard enough this time to bring redness to my skin. The tsetse dropped off, fell to the floor of the car, and lay there motionless. As yet unacquaintanted with the tsetse ruse, I immediately forgot about it. Big mistake.
I can’t swear that the fly that stabbed into my ankle moments later was the same one I had knocked off my arm, but by that time I was no longer interested in the details of individual identification. All of us were swatting, yelping, trying to juggle car windows, and generally acting like unwilling participants in a cheap horror movie.
“You can’t swat ’em,” Bill advised us from his position behind the wheel. “You have to kill ’em. One at a time. And make sure they’re dead.”
JoAnn and I had already divined this bit of practical African lore for ourselves. The problem was, kill them with what? The heaviest, loudest hand-smack was capable of dislodging them, but after playing deader than a parrot in a Monty Python sketch, they swiftly returned to the attack. A book would have been ideal, preferably something weighty by Stephen King or Tom Clancy, but our books were locked in the trunk—and with a horde of tsetses swarming around the Subaru anxious to get inside, no one offered to step out to unpack suitable volumes. Several minutes of desperate slapping and hopeful experimentation passed before the ideal solution presented itself.
I had brought along a couple of Frisbees, to play with and to trade or give away (somewhere in southern Kenya there is a Masai chief who is the proud owner of an official authorized Batman Frisbee). We soon developed a first-rate method for exterminating tsetse flies that have invaded a vehicle. I reproduce it here for all who may have need of it in the near future.
1. Use Frisbee to trap tsetse fly against solid material such as a window or dashboard.
2. Apply pressure to Frisbee.
3. Push down until you hear something crunch.
Although we suffered some nasty bites, I am happy to report that none of us contracted trypanosomiasis. However, effective as this treatment for dealing with tsetses is, I have to confess that it does come with a pair of unfortunate side effects: dirty windows (there is a lot of blood in a tsetse fly) and one very messy Frisbee. A fair trade-off, though, for avoiding the pain and blood loss that results from a bite. Having personally and successfully applied this technique on multiple occasions at Lake Manyara, Tarangire, and points north in Tanzania, I therefore recommend the inclusion of an emergency Frisbee in the baggage of anyone contemplating travel to these regions. It’s part of what you need to stay safe in the jungle and the savanna.
Socks and a Frisbee. Any caliber.
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Southeastern Peru, May 1987: A Sartorial Digression
TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM PREDATORY bloodsuckers, you obviously need more than good socks. Chapter and verse has been written and ample debate exists about what are the best clothes to wear in the depths of the rain forest. As is true of much in life, that which we learn most effectively and which sticks with us the longest we often find out by doing the wrong and not the right thing.
I certainly fulfilled that truism in the course of my first visit to real rain forest, in southeastern Peru.
Wear long pants, the written advisories said. Wear shirts with long sleeves.
What? In the