The chilling screams might have been human, if it hadn’t been for the hooting too. “Hurry,” muttered ranger Ronald Tindyebwa, lifting his rifle. “Something is wrong.

I heard them like this once before, when a chimp fell out of a high tree and died.”

With nervous excitement we ran towards the ruckus, slipping down a greasy hill to the edge of a swamp, just 50 metres from the chimps. They were huddled in two trees, shrieking at something terrifying on the floor. We couldn’t see what the danger was because of a bush the size of a small house.

“Julia! You cannot rush into a swamp!” hissed Ronald, berating his colleague, the British primatologist Julia Lloyd, as she leapt forward. Instead, the guards led the way, guns raised, expecting something - an elephant, a buffalo, a lion - to burst from the foliage.

Then Ronald started flapping his gun about in excitement as we saw the head of the enormous rock python emerge. The beast slithered slowly past, swamp water glistening on its back in the midday sun, turning briefly to acknowledge us.

I counted six metres of snake. We had inadvertently wandered into the middle of a chimp hunt - the sort of Attenborough documentary-style moment for which people cross the globe. It seemed we might have to watch the python feast on one of the apes.

The alpha male of the group, Mobutu, had unimpressively done a runner, and we later found his deputy, Flop, clinging to the top of a sapling, petrified. In their absence, a few of the troop’s foolhardy teenage miscreants decided to prove their macho credentials. A tense stand-off developed: the python sizing them up while one of the biggest adolescent males, Bwana, hurled thick branches at it.

Read more of this story here: travel.independent.co.uk

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