Woman Without Fear

By Daniel Mannix

  

   I FIRST heard of Grace Wiley when Dr. William Mann, former direc­tor of the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C., banded me a picture of a tiny woman with a gigantic king cobra draped over her shoulders like a garden hose. The snake had partly spread his hood and was looking in­tently into the camera while his mis­tress stroked his head to quiet him. Dr. Mann told me: “Grace lives in a little house full of poisonous snakes, imported from all over the world. She lets them wander around like eats. There’s been more nonsense written about ‘snake charming’ than nearly any other subject. Grace is probably the only non-Oriental who knows the real secrets of this curious business.”

Looking at the picture of that deadly creature, If knew what a famous writer meant when he described a snake as a “running brook of horror…’ Still, I like snakes and when my wife, Jule, and I moved into our Malibu house, I made it a point to call on Grace Wiley.

She was living near Cypress, outside Los Angeles, in a small three-room cot­tage surrounded by open fields. Behind the cottage was a big, ramshackle barn where the snakes were kept. Grace was cleaning snake boxes with a hose when I arrived. She was a surprisingly little lady, scarcely over five feet tall, and probably weighed less than a hundred pounds. Although Grace was sixty-four years old, she was as active as a boy and worked with smooth dexterity. When she saw me, she hurriedly picked up the four-foot rattlesnake who had been sunning himself while his box was being cleaned and poured him into his cage. The snake raised his head but made no attempt to strike or even to rattle. I was impressed but not aston­ished. In captivity, rattlers often grow sluggish and can be handled with com­parative impunity.

Grace came forward, drying her hands on her apron. “Oh dear, I meant to get dressed up for you,” she said, trying to smooth down her thatch of brown hair. “But I haven’t anybody here to help me with the snakes except Mother—and she’s eighty-four years old. Don’t trip over an alligator,” she added as I came forward. I noticed for the first time in the high grass a dozen or so alligators and crocodiles. They ranged from a three-foot Chinese croc to a big Florida ‘gator more than twelve feet long. I threaded my way among them without mishap, although several opened their huge jaws to hiss at .me.

“They don’t mean anything by that, any more than a dog barking,” Grace explained fondly. “They’re very tame and most of them know their names. Now come in and meet my little family of snakes.”

We entered the barn. The walls were lined with cages of all sizes and shapes containing snakes. Grace stopped at each cage, casually lifting the occupant and pointing out his fine points while she stroked and examined him. Grace unquestionably had one of the world’s finest collections of reptiles. I watched her handle diamondback rattlesnakes

from Texas, vipers from Italy, ferde­lance from the West Indies, a little Egyptian cobra, and the deadly karait from India.

Then I saw Grace perform a feat I would have believed impossible.

We had stopped in front of a large, glass-fronted cage containing appar­ently nothing but newspaper. “These little fellows arrived only a short time ago, so they’re very wild,” explained Grace indulgently. She quietly lifted the paper. Instantly a forest of heads sprang up in the cage. Grace moved the paper slightly. At the movement, the heads seemed to spread and flatten. Then I saw that they were not heads but hoods. I was looking at the world’s most deadly creature—the Indian cobra.

Man-eating tigers are said to kill 600 natives a year, but cobras kill 25,000 people a year in India alone. Hunters have been mauled by wounded ele­phants and lived to tell about it, but no one survives a body bite from a big cobra. I have caught rattlesnakes with a forked stick and my bare hands, but I’m not ashamed to say I jumped back from that cage as though the devil were inside as indeed he was.

Grace advanced her hand toward the nearest cobra. The snake swayed like a reed in the wind, feinting for the strike. Grace raised her hand above the snake’s head, the reptile twisting around to watch her. As the woman slowly lowered her hand, the snake gave that most terrible of all animal noises—the unearthly hiss of a deadly snake. I have

seen children laugh with excitement at r the roar of a lion, but I have never seen a anyone who did not cringe at that cold, uncanny sound. Grace deliberately s tried to touch the rigid, quivering hood. e The cobra struck at her hand. He missed. Quietly, Grace presented he. open palm. The cobra hesitated a split-second, his reared body quivering like a plucked banjo string. Then he struck

I felt sick as I saw his head  hit  Grace’s hand, but the cobra did not bite. He struck with his mouth closed

As rapidly as an expert boxer drumming on a punching bag, the snake. struck three times against Grace’s palm, always for some incredible reason with his mouth shut. Then Grace slid her open hand over his head and stroked his hood. The snake hissed again and struggled violently under her touch. Grace continued to caress him. Sud­denly the snake went limp and his hood  began to close. Grace slipped her other hand under the snake’s body and lifted him out of the cage. She held the reptile in her arms as though he were a baby.   The cobra raised his head to look Grace in the face; his dancing tongue was less than a foot from her mouth. Grace braced her hand against the curve of his body and talked calmly to him until he folded his hood. He curled up in her arms quietly until I made a slight movement; then he instantly reared up again,  threatening me.

I had never seen anything to match this performance. Later, Grace opened the cobra’s mouth to show me that the fangs were still intact. The yellow ven­om was slowly oozing over their tips.

If Grace Wiley had wished to make a mystery out of her amazing ability I am certain she could have made a fortune by posing as a woman with super­natural power. There isn’t a zoologist

alive who could have debunked her.  But Grace was a perfectly honest person who was happy to explain in detail exactly how she could handle these ter­rible creatures. I spent several weeks with her studying her technique and now that I understand it I’m even more impressed than I was before.         

      When a cobra attacks, it rears straight  upward. If you put your elbow on a table, cup your hand to represent the  open hood, and sway your forearm  back and forth, you have a good idea  of the fighting stance of a cobra. Your

index finger represents the tiny, mouse-like head that does the business. Your range is limited to the length of your  forearm. Here is a large part of the secret in handling cobras. With a little practice you can tell a cobra’s range to the inch. Also, the blow of a cobra is comparatively slow. A man with steady nerves can jerk away in time to avoid being bitten.

Another important thing to under­stand in handling a cobra is his method of striking. His fangs are short and do not fold back. Instead of stabbing, he must actually bite. He grabs his victims and then deliberately chews while the venom runs down into the wound he is making.

When Grace approached a wild co­bra, she moved her hand back and forth just outside the snake’s range. The co­bra would then strike angrily until he became tired. Then he was reluctant to strike again. Grace’s next move was to raise her hand over the snake’s hood and bring it down slowly. Because of his method of rearing, a cobra cannot strike directly upward, and Grace could actually touch the top of the snake’s head. The snake became puzzled and frustrated. He felt that he was fighting an invulnerable opponent who, after all, didn’t seem to mean him any harm.

Then came the final touch. Grace would put her open palm toward the snake. At last the cobra was able to hit

her. But he had to bite and he could not get a grip on the flat surface of the palm. If he could get a finger or a loose fold of skin he could fasten his teeth in it and start chewing. But his strike is sufficiently slow that Grace could meet each blow with the flat of her palm. At last Grace would be able to get her hand over the snake’s head and stroke his hood. This seemed to relax the rep­tile and from then on Grace could han­dle him with some degree of confidence.

1 don’t mean to suggest that this is a cut-and-dried procedure. Grace knew snakes perfectly and could tell by tiny, subtle indications what the reptile would probably do next. She had been bitten many times—she would never tell me just how many—but never by a cobra. You’re only bitten once by a cobra.

“Now I’ll show you what I know you’re waiting to see,” said Grace as she put the snake away. “My mated pair of king cobras.” Dropping her voice reverently, she added, “I call the big male ‘The King of Kings.’  She led the way to a large enclosure and for the first time in my life I was looking into the eyes of that dread reptile, the king cobra or hamadryad.

The common cobra is rarely more than five feet long. Even so, he has enough venom in his poison glands to kill fifty men. Grace’s king cohras were more than fifteen feet long. The two hamadryads contained enough venom, if injected drop by drop, to kilt nearly a thousand human beings. That wasn’t all. The hamadryad is the only snake known to attack without any provoca­tion. These fearful creatures have been reported to trail a man through a jun­gle for the express purpose of biting him. They are so aggressive that they have closed roads in India by driving

away all traffic. This is probably be­cause the hamadryads, unlike other snakes, guard their eggs and young, and if a pair sets up housekeeping in a district, every other living thing must get out—including elephants. When a king cobra rears up, he stands higher than the head of a kneeling man. They are unquestionably the most dangerous animal in the world today.

When Grace first got these monsters, she was unable to handle them as she would ordinary cobras; so she had to devise an entirely new method of work­ing with them. When the kings first arrived, they were completely unap­proachable. They reared up more than four feet, snorting and hissing, their lower jaws open to expose the poison fangs. “A very threatening look, in­deed,” Grace called it. She put them in a large cage with a sliding partition. Unlike other snakes, hamadryads are knowing enough to notice that when their keeper opens the door in the side of the cage to put in fresh water, he must expose his hand for a fraction of a second. These cobras soon learned to lie against the side of the cage and wait for Grace to open the door. She out­witted them by waiting until both of the hamadryads were on one side of the cage and then sliding in the partition before changing water pans.

She did not dare to go near their with her bare hands; she used a padded stick to stroke them. Yet she was able to touch them four days after their ar­rival. “I petted the kings on their tails when their heads were far away,” she told me. “Later in the day I had a little visit with them and told them how perfectly lovely they were that I liked them and was sure we were going to be good friends.”

A few weeks later, the King of Kings began shedding his skin. Snakes are irritable and nervous while shedding, and the hamadryad had trouble slough­ing off the thin membrane covering his eyes. Grace wrote in her diary: “I stroked his head and then pulled off the eyelids with eyebrow forceps. He flinched a little but was unafraid. He put out his tongue in such a knowing manner! I mounted the eyelids and they looked just like pearls. What a pity that there have been nothing but unfriendly, aggressive accounts about this sweet snake. Really, the intelligence of these creatures is unbelievable.”

The King of Kings was so heavy that Grace was unable to lift him by herself. Jule offered to help her carry the snake outside for a picture. While Jule and Grace were staggering out the door with the monster reptile between them, the king suddenly reared and rapped Jule several times on her forehead with his closed mouth. “He’s trying to tell you something!” exclaimed Grace. He was indeed. I saw that the Chinese crocodile had rushed out from under a table and had grabbed the hamadryad by the tail. JuIe relaxed her grip and the king dropped his head and gave a single hiss. The croc promptly let go and the ladies bore the cobra out into the sunlight. I was the only person who seemed upset by the incident.

Out of curiosity, I asked Grace if she ever used music in taming her snakes. She laughed and told me what I already knew: all snakes are deaf. Grace assured mc that the Hindu fakir uses his flute only to attract a crowd and by swaying his own body back and forth the fakir keeps the snake swaying as the cobra is feinting to strike. The man times his music to correspond to the snake’s movements and it appears  to dance to the tune. The fakir naturally keeps well outside the cobra’s striking range. Years later when I was in India, I discovered that this is exactly what happens. I never saw any Oriental snake-charmer even approxi­mate Grace’s marvelous power over  reptiles. .

Grace’s main source of income was to exhibit her snakes to tourists, al­though she was occasionally able to  rent a snake to a movie studio (she always went along to make sure the rep tile wasn’t frightened or injured), and sometimes she bought ailing snakes from dealers, cured them, and resold them for a small profit to zoos. While I was with her, a dusty car stopped and discharged a plump couple with three noisy children who had seen her modest sign Grace Wiley—Reptiles. Grace explained that she would show them her collection, handle the poisonous snakes, call over the tame alligators, and let the children play with Rocky, an eighteen-foot Indian Rock python which she had raised from a baby. The charge was twenty-five cents. ‘That’s too much,” the woman said to her husband and they went back to the car. Grace sighed. “No one seems interested in my snakes. No one really cares about them. And they’re so wonderful.”

One day Grace telephoned inc to say that she had gotten a new shipment  of snakes, including some Indian

cobras from Siam. “One of them has markings that form a complete G on the back of his hood,” she told me. “

Isn’t it curious that the snake and I have the same initial! I call him My Snake.” We laughed about this, and then

Jule and I went out to Cypress to take a last set of pictures of Grace and her snakes for an article I was doing about this remarkable woman.

We took several pictures and then I asked Grace to let me get a picture of the cobra with the G on the hood. “I didn’t look very well in those other pictures,” said Grace anxiously. “I’ll comb my hair and put on another blouse.” She was back in a few minutes. Jule and I had set up our cameras in the yard behind the barn. I wanted a shot of the cobra with spread hood, and Grace brought him out cradled in hei arms. Before allowing me to take the picture, she removed her glasses as she felt that she looked better without them The cobra refused to spread and Grace put him down on the ground and extended her flat palm toward him to make him rear—something I had often seen her do before, but never without her glasses.

 I was watching through the finder o my camera. I saw the cobra spread am strike as 1 clicked the shutter. As the image disappeared from the ground glass of my Graflex, I looked up and saw’ that the snake had seized Grace by the middle finger. She said in he usual quiet voice, “Oh. he’s bitten me.”

I dropped the camera and ran toward her, feeling an almost paralyzing sense of shock, for I knew that Grace Wiley was a dead woman. At the same time I thought, “Good Lord, it’s just like the book,” for the cobra was behaving exactly as textbooks on cobra say they behave. He was deliberately chewing on the wound to make the venom run out of his glands. It was terrible sight.

Quietly and expertly, Grace took hold of the snake and gently forced his mouth open. I knew that her only chance for life was to put a tourniquet around the finger instantly and slash open the wound to allow the venom to  run out. Seconds counted. I reached b out my hand to take the snake above  the hood so she could immediately start  squeezing out the venom, but Grace motioned me away. She stood up, still holding the cobra, and walked into the  barn. Carefully, she put the snake into  his cage and closed the door.

     This must have taken a couple of _minutes and I knew that the venom was spreading through her system each moment. “Jule,” said Grace, “call Wesley Dickinson. He’s a herpetologist and a friend of mine. He’ll know what to do.’   Calmly and distinctly she gave Jule the telephone number and Jule ran to the phone. Then Grace turned to me. Suddenly she said, “He didn’t really bite me, did he?” It was the only emotion I saw her show. I could only say, “Grace, where’s your snake-bite kit?” We both knew that nothing except immediate amputation of her arm could save her, but anything was worth a chance.                She pointed to a cabinet. There was a tremendous collection of the surgical  aids used for snake bite but I don’t believe any of the stuff had been touched for twenty years. I pulled out a rubber  tourniquet and tried to twist it around  her finger. The old rubber snapped in  my hands. Grace didn’t seem to notice.  I pulled out my handkerchief and tried that. It was too thick to go around her  finger and I twisted it around her wrist.  “I’ll faint in a few minutes,” said Grace. -“I want to show you where everything is before I lose consciousness.”

    Cobra venom, unlike rattlesnake venom, affects the nervous system. In a few minutes the victim becomes paralyzed and the heart stops beating. I knew Grace was thinking of this. She said, “You must give me strychnine in­jections to keep my heart going when I begin to pass out. I’ll show you where the strychnine is kept. You may have to give me caffeine also.”

She walked to the other end of the room and I ran alongside trying to keep the tourniquet in place. She got out the tiny glass vials of strychnine and caf­feine and also a hypodermic syringe with several needles. I saw some razor blades with the outfit and picked one up, intending to make a deep incision to let out as much of the venom as pos­sible. Grace shook her head. “That won’t do any good,” she told me. Cobra venom travels along the nerves, so mak­ing the wound bleed wouldn’t be very effective, but it was all I could think of to do.

Jule came back with a Mr. Tanner, Grace’s cousin who lived next door. Tanner immediately got out his jack­knife, intending to cut open the wound, but Grace stopped him. “Wait until Wesley comes,” she said. Tanner told me afterward that he was convinced that if he had amputated the finger Grace might have lived. This is doubt­ful. Probably nothing except amputa­tion of her arm would have saved her then, and we had nothing but a jack­knife. She probably would have died of shock and loss of blood.

Grace lay on the floor to keep as quiet as possible and slow the absorp­tion of the venom. “You’d better give me the strychnine now, dear,” she told Jule. Jule snapped off the tip of one of the glass vials but the cylinder broke in her hands. She opened another tube and tried to fill the syringe; the needle was rusted shut. Jule selected another needle, tested it, and filled the syringe. “I’m afraid it will hurt,” she told Grace.

“Now don’t worry, dear,” said Grace comfortingly. “I know you’ll do it very well.”

After the injection, Grace asked Jule to put a newspaper under her head to keep her hair from getting dirty. A few minutes later, the ambulance arrived, with Wesley Dickinson following in his own car. Wesley had telephoned the hospital and arranged for blood trans­fusions and an iron lung. As Grace was lifted into the ambulance, she called back to Tanner, “Remember to cut up the meat for my frogs very fine and take good care of my snakes.” That was the last we ever saw of her.

Grace died in the hospital half an hour later. She lived about ninety min­utes after being bitten. In the hospital, Wesley directed the doctors to drain the blood out of her arm and pump in fresh blood. When her heart began to fail she was put into the lung. She had become unconscious. Then her heart stopped. Stimulants were given. The slow beat­ing began again but grew steadily weaker. Each time stimulants were given, the heart responded less strongly and finally stopped forever.

We waited with Mr. and Mrs. Tan­ner at the snake barn, calling the hos­pital at intervals. When we heard that Grace was dead, Mrs. Tanner burst into tears. “Grace was such a beautiful young girl and so talented,” she moaned. “There wasn’t anything she couldn’t do. Why did she ever want to mess around with those awful snakes?”

“I guess that’s something none of us will ever understand,” said her husband sadly.

Grace was horn in Kansas in 1884. She studied entomology at the Univer­sity of Kansas and during field trips to collect insects it was a great joke among Grace’s fellow students that she was terrified of even harmless garter snakes.  Later, however, after her marriage failed, Grace turned with a passionate interest to the creatures she had so long feared. In 1923 she became curator of the Museum of Natural History at the a Minneapolis Public Library but quar­reled with the directors, who felt that her reckless handling of poisonous snakes endangered not only her own  life but that of others. She went to the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago; here the same difficulty arose. Finally Grace moved to California where she could  work with reptiles as she wished.

An attempt was made by several of Grace’s friends to keep her collection together for a Grace Wiley Memorial Reptile House, but this failed. The snakes were auctioned off and the snake that had killed Grace was purchased by a roadside  zoo in Arizona. Huge sign boards bearing an artist’s conception of the incident were erected for miles along the highways.

So passed one of the most remark-s able people I have ever known.

THE END