SNAKE WAYS

Gisborne Times, Volume LXIX, Issue 10860, 2 April 1929, Page 3

SNAKE WAYS

STRANGE AND SINUOUS

SO.AIE AUSTRALIAN EXAMPLES

Probably due to the dry season snakes- are very plentiful in the bush districts of Australia this season, and almost every day the papers contain stories of encounters with reptiles. Home of these stories are amazing in character, tor snakes turn up in the most unexpected things. They are not things to be trifled with/though the bite seldom proves fatal these dnyy, simply because the bush folk are prepared for such emergencies. The other day a linesman in Queensland, while repairing a telephone firebox, encountered a snake inside the box and was bitten. He was able to give .lunself 'be neres--nrv httention. hurried to a hospital miles away, and Ins life was saved. .Nobody can explain how the snake entered the telephone box, but snakek have funnv little ways like that. At the Sydney markets not long ago a man opened a box of bananas that- had come from Queensland. and he was bitten by a snake which had secreted itself inside the case, apparently between the time the ease was packed and the top battens were fastened down. In a Melbourne suburb a few weeks ago. a mail who had been sleeping on a porch discovered in the morning that his bed mate during the night had been a venomous snake. He had not been bitten. This recalls the story of a bushmau in Central Australia. He woke up in the middle of the night with an uncanny feeling. He was sleeping out and felt something c-old- reposing on his leg. Guessing what the intruder was he carefully end gradually removed his rugs. A sudden movement would have meant a snake bite. M hen the reptile felt the cold air upon it. it uncoiled and set out for a warmer spot. It met with a violent death on Hie way. Last winter a small, black snake turned up at a Collingwood (Melbourne) home through the water tap. Not long before that event- another slid out of a water tap in another -Melbourne suburb. Last August, when fhe Moeraki was on a voyage from Suva to 'Lautoka, the midnight silence of Hie ship was broken by" the screaming of a woman passenger. She had been awakened by a squirmy feeling on her neck. She finished her neck with her hand pud a snake fell to the floor. Her husband killed it. However. she. need not have been afraid, because the snake belonged to Hie non poisonous type.