Skink

Last week, I awoke at my usual time. When the sun comes up and goes down at exactly the same time every day, your body gets into a predictable rhythm of sleep and rising. Mine is about 7 a.m, give or take.

On this particular day, as my brain rose slowly through the levels of waking fog, I became away of a rustling sound not more than a few feet from my head. The slow shifting accelerated and my eyes popped open. I hollered for Doug to come for backup. “It sounds big!” I fussed (what I meant was, bigger than the regular old 3-8 inches of ugly lizard that we sometimes have crawling around the corners of our house.)

Doug showed up at the door of the bedroom. Still perched on the bed, I carefully dragged the bedside cupboard toward the bed, opening the inches on the other side between the cupboard and the wall so he could have a look from his vantage. “o-0h.” he said, the rise in tone indicating that what he saw impressed him. “What is it?” I belted. “It looks about the size of a monitor lizard,” was the reply.

If you’ve ever seen a monitor lizard, you can understand my reaction at that moment. First, I shrieked something exclamatory, then bolted for the safety escape of the door. 

At the door, I took a furtive glance towards the crack where the alleged 2-5 foot lizard lay. I laughed then, because the black tail I saw lying suggestively around the back corner of the cupboard was not nearly that big. Still, he was right it was big enough. I kept laughing for a while at the exageration of my usually understated husband.

The next moments were spent arming ourselves with engudi (Maasai elder sticks) and a broom. Rolling rugs and setting up piles of shoes to “guide” our visitor to the back door. 

Despite the reduction in alleged size of the lizard, I was still plagued with an uncontrollable revulsion and overwhelming physical reaction whenever Doug would exclaim about its movements.  At one point, this led to our “losing” the critter. It happened that he was so close to the back door, when he suddenly lurched back toward my stick. Doug hollered, "he's climbing your stick!" Immediately, my mind was back to the monitor lizard and its razor sharp claws flying 30 mph up the stick in my hand and I dropped it and dashed away shrieking (so much for taking charge with my elder stick). That's how he got a way. And that's when he decided to dissappear. 

At that point, we had to put the kitchen appliances and furniture back in place and get ready to leave since we were going to Nairobi overnight. Needless to say, Doug set up ingenious blockades to corral the nasty guy in case to deter him from returning to the depths of the house. 

Before he’d “disappeared”, we’d snapped shots of him. Later we pulled out the snake and reptile book that we keep handy at all times. He turned out to be a skink. There are lots of kinds of these hefty lizards and they are also said to be harmless. This however, did not ease the physical reactions I had every time he wagged his body side to side like a snake slipping rapidly across the floor. 

Upon our return from Nairobi, we opened the door to a stench of death. Immediately, we thought it was the stink of skink. However, we ended up discovering him hiding in the corner, alive and well and ready to be ushered out the back door. We never learned the root cause of the stink, but pouring water down a drain to wet a dried out trap seemed to take care of the issue. Whew!