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Outside Magazine April 2002

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Bit (Cont.)

AFTER IT WAS OVER, we'd all wonder why Joe had reached into the snake bag with barely a glance inside. As with any pivotal moment, the exact words exchanged beforehand would be endlessly debated. Snakes of the genus Dinodon are harmless, but some are near-perfect mimics of the multibanded krait (Bungarus multicinctus), a cousin of the cobra and much more deadly. As field team leader, U Htun Win should have known the difference—but he told us he'd been bitten by the snake the day before and nothing had happened. Joe, however, was the authority. Possibly simple exhaustion brought his guard down; perhaps he failed to heed the uncertainty in U Htun Win's tentative identification.

Following breakfast, around 7:30, Joe lay down. At 8 he noticed a tingling in the muscles of his hand, and asked Dong Lin to call the group together. By 8:15, two Burmese assistants started the run of eight miles to Naung-Mon, the nearest town with a radio. Joe calmly told us what would probably happen and what we should do. He described the effects of a slowly increasing paralysis, eventually requiring mouth-to-mouth respiration until he could be taken to a hospital. If he lived, the neurotoxins would work their way out of his system in 48 hours. He would be conscious, he told us, the whole time.

As the morning went on Joe had to reach up to open his eyelids. His breathing grew raspy; his voice was reduced to a slur. In time he could only write messages: "Please support my head, it's hard for me." "If I vomit, it could be bad." "Can I lean back a little." By noon he could no longer breathe on his own. "Blow harder," he wrote. In his final message, minutes later, Joe spelled out "let me di." We won't let that happen, Guin Wogan said. Kick butt, Joe, I added.

At 3 p.m. our runners returned alone, and told us the military had requested an update before they would send an air rescue. Two fresh assistants were sent back, again insisting that a helicopter be sent. By evening the weather turned from the best we'd seen in a week on the trail to a renewed downpour; low clouds would impede the rescue again the next day. That night soldiers arrived on foot with an ancient field radio and a young Burmese doctor with two nurses and a little equipment, including an old respirator no one could get to work.

Throughout that long night, we all helped out as we could, but much of the time was spent in simple exhausted witness. From time to time, Dong would put his arm around various members of the group and say, "I love you." In one long moment of vertigo, as someone who's had his own close calls with snakes, I looked at Joe in the torchlight and saw how alike we were in build, complexion, even our features, and I felt I was somehow watching myself die. Looking at Dong, Guin, and U Htun Win standing silently nearby, I wondered if they felt something similar.

By 3 a.m. Joe could no longer signal us except with his big toe. His final communication occurred when ornithology assistant Maureen Flannery, whose strength had been keeping us all going, asked if she and Guin could stop doing mouth-to-mouth and let the guys take over. Joe's toe signals indicated a preference for the women.

During the 26 stifling, sandfly-infested hours that the artificial respiration continued, four airliners plowed into their final destinations in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. The only one of us who knew was David Catania, a Cal Academy ichthyologist so unobtrusive I often forgot he was there. Dave had listened to his shortwave radio after collapsing briefly in his tent late in the night. Keeping the news to himself, he came out and gave Joe mouth-to-mouth for hours, his face showering sweat. He refused to let anyone else take over, even long after Joe's heart had stopped.

At 12:25 p.m. on September 12, the doctor told us Joe's pulse was gone. We began three hours of CPR, in anticipation of a rescue helicopter that was never able to land.

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