We were in the basement of the the water treatment plant. Nice cool, moist place. Lots of crickets and frogs, the occasional snake too! Spencer Oyemaja (my Nigerian co-worker) and I found a simply HUGE Diamondback Water Snake under a set of stairs. My idea was to catch it and release but it looked so much like a Cottonmouth. I'm pretty sharp on snake species but it was tricky, huge thick body and wide head. I guess he had to go. Spencer by-passed all that figuring and went straight to KILL. We got this long handled scraper and I had this silly squeegee. Not a good snake weapon but it was handy and good to hold it down keep from getting away.
We commenced our attack. I made a move and got him pinned. Spencer went to work with the scraper tool. The snake was going wild and squirting this foul smelling stink water all over. Spencer was regressing into some type of native fury. He'd let out a squeal with a violent jab of the stick, then revert into some Yoruba (his native language) punctuation that I think must have been "die snake". His voice pitch changed, and his big white eyes turned black. It was more of a shriek followed by some African excitement. Task loaded as I was, it was much later after I got his bristles all smoothed back down, we had a bit metered laugh. It really took a lot out of him. Like a Witchdoctor exerting all his power to project his power. I tried to get him to tell me what he was saying during the attack but all he commented was "big nasty snake". Maybe that was really what he was saying. He was not in good shape to have a calm conversation. I confirmed it was a water snake by examining it's pupils, they were round, not elliptic like a pit viper. I was not going to get that close while he was still alive. He was huge!