“You can die within 20 minutes if you get bitten,” says the founder-director of the Kālinga Foundation (kaalinga sarpa is Kannada for King Cobra) located in the Agumbe rainforests in the Malnad region of the Central Western Ghats. Shankar was lucky. “The snake didn’t inject enough venom because I reacted quickly… Didn’t give him a chance to hold onto me and pump it in,” he says. But even the minuscule amount of venom resulted in terrible swelling and pain. Snake bite was treated symptomatically, “like COVID before we had the vaccine,” he says.