How rational is it to spend AU$250 on a snake catcher to remove a snake in a country that’s full of snakes and when the snake in question retails for AU$700?
The day before yesterday we were visited by a two-metre long diamond-back python at our house on the New South Wales Central Coast. It had draped itself attractively across the side wall of our verandah, resting on a number of holiday souvenirs, plates and things, and was taking a nap.
Viva!, screams a brightly-coloured plate from Mexico, belying the national sport there of massacring each other. We bought it in a souvenir shop in the main drag of Tijuana, the military patrolling the streets in a jeep with a mounted machine gun. “Buy it from me”, the disreputable-looking shop owner had urged us as the jeep trundled past, “we all sell the same shit but only I can get you a safe taxi back to the border crossing.”
Hawaii, states a sign (without exclamation mark). It displays a number of crudely painted flowers of the kind Hawaiians drape around their necks, yelling Aloha! at hapless tourist arrivals. Whilst on duty as paid airport greeters, that is. Normally Hawaiians don’t seem to use Aloha very much, with or without exclamation mark. Hawaii, it’s an island, so you can’t call it a hole, but the best thing about Hawaii is where it disappears into the Pacific Ocean, and then only in some places. O, it’s beautiful there!
There are also a number of souvenir plates showing off the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House, because even we Australians know and accept that Australia isn’t really a country but a package holiday destination from which we will never return, so it makes sense to acquire and display souvenirs from where we live.
Back to the snake.
Mrs Henry thought that the snake wasn’t real, and that, in fact, I had put a facsimile there by way of a practical joke, even though never in our marriage have I ever pulled a practical joke.
It’s not that I am against practical jokes. They just never occur to me.
Back to the snake.
Mrs Henry went to pull the fake snake off her souvenir plates, and the snake moved.
As mentioned, this snake was a 2-metre long snake. That’s a lot of snake.
It’s something you realise even more powerfully when it suddenly moves of its own accord, and it caused a lot of high-pitched screaming.
But Mrs Henry survived. In fact, she went back to doing what she had been doing: playing online bridge.
After all, a snake was one of God’s creatures, too, and had to be somewhere. And as long it didn’t break any plates…
Incidentally, Google had reassured Mrs Henry and myself that diamond-back pythons are not venomous, not aggressive unless restrained, and slow-moving. They retail at AU$700 as pets.
They are also extremely quiet. The US Stealth Bomber has nothing on a ‘diamond-back’, as we had already started to call it familiarly. It doesn’t rattle. Not even a little bit. Mrs Henry looked up and it had gone.
Or so, she thought. Instead, it had moved, without a sound or breaking a plate, to the top of the balustrade near Mrs Henry, where it was looking inquisitively at her and her online hand, rearing slightly, tongue slithering in and out just like Kaa’s in Jungle Book.
The effect of all those Google reassurances vanished in a split second.
We were now in fearful thrall to the ‘diamond-back’, vacating the verandah, closing doors and windows.
Next thing ‘the snake’ (it had gone back to being called that) was exploring the shed, immediately down from the verandah and home to the laundry, workshop and office, until I plucked up the courage to stamp heavily on the concrete floor at a very safe distance, and it huffily retreated under the house (If youse don’t want me here, I’ll just go!).
It won’t come back, Mrs Henry said, confidence restored now that she could no longer see ‘the snake’.
But it did. The next morning it was back in the laundry section of the shed.
I closed all the doors, locking in ‘the snake’, and rang a snake catcher, who said his call out fee was AU$250 and that he would “pop over right away”.
When he arrived in the late afternoon with a camera affixed to his head “to put this on me website”, he emptied out all the shelves, scoured all cupboards, checked inside the washing machine, checked inside the drier, but there was no getting away from it: ‘the snake’ had walked. So to speak.
A little later, so had AU$250.
Mrs Henry rationalised the loss of AU$250 the next day when ‘the snake’ had not returned and seemed unlikely to do so. It was probably the locking up which did it, she said. That’s what caused the ‘diamond-back’ (so called again now that it had gone) to find an urgent escape hole. Then, when the snake catcher finally arrived and started making lots of noise searching the laundry, the ‘diamond back’ decided it had definitely outstayed its welcome, and it went elsewhere after probably hanging around under the house until dark.
