Australian Tales - Setis

again, and forced the jagged end of the sapling down on the reptile, when
it slowly uncoiled itself, and dropped into the pool of water beneath,
from which, after some difficulty, I dragged it ashore, and killed it. It
was a diamond snake, rather more than twelve feet in length, and was in
a state of repletion; having but a short time before, swallowed a kangaroo
rat. The details of that cruel murder, and my escape from sitting on that
formidable reptile, have impressed “Dead-man's creek” vividly on my
memory.
I could write a long chapter, horrible enough to scare a soldier, about
wonderful escapes from “tremendous snakes” of which I have been told.
By-the-bye, most of the snakes that escape and that, of course, are never
measured are of enormous dimensions; and the same remark applies to
sharks, and many other terrible things, that travellers frequently talk
about. I have heard too, some hair-raising stories of snakes being found
in beds, and under beds; in bonnet boxes, in flour bags, in chests with
Sunday clothes, or coiled up in a stockman's empty boots, or in the
pocket of a farmer's great coat, which hung against the wall of his slab
hut. Although many of those stories are quite authentic, I shall not relate
them in detail; for I do not wish to intimidate my young readers. It is
very far from my desire to create bugbears, or to encourage pusillanimity
in any form. I only wish in giving a few examples, to induce ordinary
prudence in guarding against accidents from those deadly reptiles.
I once met with a gentleman in the interior, (a new arrival,) who had
such a horror of snakes, that he would scarcely stir out of his house, on
foot, after dark; and even in daylight he walked through the bush in
nervous trepidation. He had heard “travellers tell strange tales,” of the
dangers of the bush from the prevalence of deadly reptiles, until he had
got a settled dread on his mind, which was excessively painful to him,
but which he could not reason away. He seemed surprised and somewhat
relieved, when I told him, that although I had been more than twenty
years in the colony, and had lived much of that time in the interior, that I
had not seen a hundred snakes. I owned that I probably might have seen
many more if I had specially searched for them, for on one occasion, I
went out with my gun and my pointer dogs, on a sultry afternoon, to the
margin of a small lagoon, not more than a mile from a country town, and
there shot seven or eight black snakes, in about two hours. But that
locality was notoriously infested with those reptiles.
Pedestrians should look carefully to their feet, when travelling on a hot
day in the vicinity of swamps, lagoons, or drains, as snakes particularly
inhabit such localities, and they often come out of their hiding places,
and lie in the foot-paths, for like cats they are fond of basking in the
sunshine. They will, however, generally wriggle away as fast as they can,
on the approach of a human being, although on several occasions, a
snake has reared its head, and glared on me with its basilisk-like eyes,