IV. ABOUT SNAKES.

There were plenty of things in the Wonga-Wonga garden, but they were not arranged very tidily. It was hard to say where the beds ended, and the paths began; and near the bottom fence there was a patch that was exceedingly slovenly. In the midst of loquat trees and peach trees, and ninety-days’ corn, and sweet potatoes, and golden-blossomed pumpkin vines, there was a coarse grass-plat, almost as big as a little paddock. A clump of prickly pear grew in it, and one great aloe, with names cut on some of its pointed leaves, and the ends of others hacked off as if they were sword-bayonets broken in receiving a charge of cavalry. And yet the grass-plat looked cosy too—shut in with fruit and flowers and vegetables and green corn, or blossoming corn, or brown corn hanging down great heavy cobs, like truncheons with brass-headed nails driven close together into them, and with the hot Australian sunshine pouring down on the long dry tangled grass. Bees buzzed about over it, and butterflies, with white drops on their black velvet wings, found out its flowers, and the pumpkins, squashes, cucumbers, vegetable marrows, and rock and water-melons were fond of crawling into the hay-like grass, to bulge out and ripen into gold and bloomy green, and speckled green and yellow. The guinea-fowl and turkeys were very fond of laying their eggs in the grass-plat too; and in late spring and summer, and early autumn, snakes were very fond of it also. Up-country people in Australia get careless about snakes, as colliers in England get careless about fire-damp and choke-damp—just because they may be killed by them any day.
53

One day Mrs. Lawson put on her sun-bonnet, with a curtain that came half-way down her back, and went to the grass-plat to look for eggs, and Harry went with her. All of a sudden she started up with a great black snake coiled round her arm. Though Harry was a slapdash little fellow, he could be cool enough sometimes. The instant he saw what was the matter he darted at the snake before it could bite, just like a snake when it springs, as stiff and as straight as an arrow, and caught it round the throat so tightly with both hands, that it could not put its horrid fangs either into them or into his mother’s arm. Mrs. Lawson didn’t shriek, but stood quite still (though her face was very white, both for Harry’s sake and her own), so that the snake might not get a chance to wriggle free: it was lashing about with its nasty tail, and swelling out as if it wanted to burst itself. Harry knew that Sydney was taking an after-breakfast pipe on the verandah, and shouted as loudly as the throttling he was giving the snake would let him:
54

“Syd, there’s a beastly snake on mamma! I’ve grabbed him.”

All the Lawsons could put this and that together; so, before he rushed to the rescue, Sydney dashed into the keeping-room for the carving-knife. He was not long about it.

“Hold on like grim death,” he said to Harry, when he ran down; and then he sliced through the snake just under Harry’s fingers. The head part gave such a jump that, after all, the horrid fangs nearly went into Mrs. Lawson’s arm, but Harry managed to keep hold of the slippery thing until he could fling it ever so far off; whilst the headless part untwined from his mother’s arm, and writhed about on the ground in a very uncanny fashion. When the head had been smashed with a stone, and kicked up to a great red boil of an ant-hill, and the tail dragged after it, for the ants to pick the bones, both parts still kept twitching every now and then.
55

“Snakes can’t die outright, you know, until after sundown.” said Harry.

“Confound the beast! He’s made me break my pipe,” said Sydney.

But though they talked in that cool way, they had both hugged their mother like boa-constrictors when she was safe from the black snake; and when she gave over kissing Harry for a minute, Sydney had clapped him on the back, and said that he was proud to have a game little fellow like that for a brother. Harry scarcely knew whether he was more pleased by the kissing or the clapping—although he did not quite relish being called a little fellow.
56

Black snakes, and all kinds of snakes, swarmed about Wonga-Wonga in warm weather. In cold weather—such cold weather, that is, as they have in Australia—the snakes lie up in holes. They are not very brisk when they first come out in spring. They seem to be rubbing their eyes, so to speak, after their long sleep; but perhaps they are most dangerous then, because they are more likely to let you tread on them, instead of getting out of your way, as they are generally glad enough to do.
57

One bright spring morning in September (seasons are turned topsy-turvy, you know, in Australia), Donald had gone down with John Jones’s little boy to pull up some night lines that Harry and Donald had set in the creek, Harry was too lazy to turn out that morning, so Donald had got little Johnny Jones to go with him. Johnny had no shoes or stockings on, and as he ran to pull one of the lines up, he set his bare foot on a sluggish snake, coiled up like a lady’s back-hair, in a hollow of a black log he was clambering over. Up came the flat head and bit Johnny’s great toe, and off the snake wriggled. Poor little Johnny was dreadfully scared, but Donald made him sit down on the log, and tied one of the fishing lines so tightly round the toe that it almost cut to the bone. Then Donald went down on his knees, and sucked the poison out as well as he could, and spat it out on the ground. What with the bite, and the fright, and the tight string, Johnny could not manage to walk. So Donald took him up on his back like a sack, and trotted off to the house with him, and told Mr. Lawson about him. Mr. Lawson at once cut out the bitten part with a sharp pen-knife, and blazed some gunpowder in the hollow, and, except that he had to limp a little for a day or two, Johnny came to no harm. But if it had not been for Donald, very likely his leg would have swelled up, and he would have grown sleepy, and perhaps died, long before the doctor could have been fetched from Jerry’s Town; and when the doctor had come, perhaps he would not have been able to do any good. If “Old Cranky” or any of the black fellows had been on the station, they might have cured Johnny perhaps.
58

Old Cranky was a half-crazy, transported poacher, whom the squatters paid to wander about their runs, killing dingoes. Though he was half-crazy, he was sharp enough in doing that; and he was a snake-tamer too. He used to carry little ones about in his cabbage-tree hat, and trouser-pockets, and the bosom of his blue blouse, and pull out a bundle of them every now and then like a pocket-handkerchief. He left the fangs in them, and they sometimes bit him, but he had found out something that always cured him at any rate; and the blacks have got something of the same kind.
59

Some people say that when a stump-lizard has been bitten in a fight with a snake, it eats the leaves of a little herb that prevents the poison from taking effect, and that the blacks and snake-charmers have found out what the herb is. The stump-lizard is a thick spotted brown and blue thing that is very fond of killing snakes; though it is so lazy generally, that when it thinks you want to hurt it, it won’t take the trouble to run away, but only turns round and makes ugly faces at you. To be sure it can give you a nasty bite if you do lay hold of it. The big-headed laughing jackass is very fond, too, of stabbing snakes and breaking their backs with its strong beak. It seems to enjoy the jobbing job, as if it thought that it was only serving them out fairly for eating birds and birds’ eggs. One day Donald shot a snake that was climbing up a tree to a bird’s-nest; and another day he and Harry came upon one that was mesmerizing a lot of little diamond sparrows. Half of it was coiled up like a corkscrew, and the rest went backwards and forwards, like a boat’s tiller when no one has got hold of it; and the little birds kept on coming nearer and nearer, as if they were being drawn into its open mouth. When Harry shied a stick and frightened them away, the snake looked round at him quite savagely before it rustled off.
60

There were plenty of snakes, as I have said, about Wonga-Wonga. Great black-backed and yellow-backed fellows crawled into the huts sometimes when the men were away, and coiled themselves up in the boots and blankets; and little lithe mud-brown whip-snakes used to pop out their wicked-looking little heads between the planks of the wool-shed, and the house verandah, and the weather-boards of the barn, and then pop in again before a gun could be pointed at them. Whilst the snakes were about, too, it was a hazardous thing to pull a log out of the wood-heap. You might have fancied that Harry and Donald saw enough snakes to keep them from wanting to hear about any more, but Old Cranky’s snake stories fascinated them as the snakes fascinate the little birds. He told them about the death-adder, with its feet like a lizard’s, and its sting like a wasp’s, besides the venomous fangs in its thick head; and of the huge boas that he had seen “ever so far up country,” joining the trees together with great cat’s cradles. There is a stumpy snake in Australia that is, perhaps, particularly dangerous, because it lies still to be trodden on; and there is, also, a small python; and out of these men like Old Cranky have made up their death-adders and their big boas. When the boys asked him to let them get a peep at these hideous creatures, he always put them off with the excuse that there were none for miles thereabouts; but he did show them something in the snake line that they did not forget in a hurry.
61

From wandering about the country so much alone, and not being afraid of snakes, Old Cranky knew of places that even the blacks did not know of. It was for one of these that he, and the boys, and his gingerbread kangaroo-bitch, and a shaggy old mongrel, with an ear and a half and a quarter of a tail, that could find game like a pointer and bring it in like a retriever, started one summer’s day. The old man made a great mystery of what he was going to show the boys. Except that he took them by short cuts that they were not familiar with, they saw nothing remarkable until they came to the brim of a deep little basin, with a big water-hole fringed with thick scrub at the bottom. They had not gone many steps down the side before Lag—that was the mongrel’s name—lifted up his fore-foot.
62

“What’s the dog pointing at?” asked Harry.

“Quail, I suppose?” said Donald.

“No, it ain’t quail,” Old Cranky answered with a grin. “Can’t ye smell ’em? Well, ye’ll see ’em soon. Keep close ahind me. Don’t ye tread but jest where I goes.”
63

They did see them soon. It was snakes the old man meant. He had brought them to what he called the Snakes’ Corrobboree. There they were in scores: snakes with backs like Spanish leather, and snakes with backs like a gaudy-patterned carpet; snakes with white china bellies and with striped china bellies; snakes with verdigrised-copper bellies, and with scoured-copper bellies; snakes of all colours and all sizes, up to seven feet or so; snakes wriggling like eels through the water, and floating on it like straight sticks; snakes undulating through the scrub; snakes basking on dry ground, curled up like coils of rope, or littered about like black cravats untidily thrown down upon the floor; snakes twined round tree-poles like variegated creepers, and snakes dangling their heads from grey branches like waving clusters of poisonous fruit.

“THE SNAKES CORROBBOREE.”

“I’ll go bail ye niver see the like of that afore,” said Old Cranky. “Ain’t it a pretty sight? I niver showed it to nobody afore. I likes to come an’ watch ’em by myself. Me an’ the dog, that is. Lag likes it ’most as well as me. Fan, there, is afeard. She stayed outside, ye see.”
64

The boys felt almost as afraid of Lag and Old Cranky as they were of the snakes when they heard of such peculiar tastes. Heartily glad were they when they joined the kangaroo-bitch outside the horrible basin, and they felt relieved, too, when they reached a track they knew, and the crazy old snake-charmer slouched off on his way to the next station with his dogs behind him.

Tired as they were with their long walk when they got back to Wonga-Wonga, Harry and Donald did not have “pleasant dreams and sweet repose” that night. They both of them dreamt of the Snakes’ Corrobboree; and, I scarcely need say, they never took the trouble to find their way to it again.