CALIFORNIA: Creeping Death

• Share

Of all her snakes, 64-year-old Grace Wiley loved the cobras best. They were the most intelligent, she thought, and the most easily tamed. "It's just that people are afraid to try to tame them. They know that you can only fail once with a king cobra."

But Grace Wiley had never been afraid, she handled her reptiles patiently and lovingly, filled one room of her Cypress, Calif, home with over a hundred of them: King and Queen, the cobras; Roxy, the nine-foot python; Perky, the water moccasin. They made her hobby, her life's study and her reputation as one of the nation's top herpetologists. Last week she readily agreed to pose for pictures with her newest pet: a five-foot cobra she had just received from India.

To get it into position for the picture, she patted its head, stroked its back, quietly coaxed it to extend its hood. As the cobra's head began to bob rhythmically back & forth, Mrs. Wiley felt suddenly that it was not responding well. "It's getting nervous," she said. "I'd better put it away." As she reached for it, the cobra struck.

For a full 30 seconds she struggled to get the needle-sharp fangs out of her middle finger, pressing with all her strength against the cobra's locked jaws. When she had torn the snake loose and carefully returned it to its cage, she calmly instructed the photographer to apply tourniquets to her wrist and elbow told him where to find stimulants and needles. But the needles were rusty and the vials broke in the photographer's hand. "Take me to a hospital at once," she ordered. "This is serious."

Forty minutes after the cobra struck, Mrs. Wiley was in Long Beach Municipal Hospital. The only antivenom serum there was from North American snakes, and useless for cobra bites. Her throat muscles had begun to contract ominously. Mrs. Wiley, now almost unconscious, shook her head hopelessly. She was put into an iron lung, but it was too late; the paralysis was creeping through her chest. When it reached her heart muscles, an hour and forty minutes after she had been bitten, Grace Wiley died.