The Best Australian Stories 2014 (7 page)

‘Maybe Dad will let us make a fire and we can cook it ourselves.'

‘Yeah!'

And we run, our legs caked in grey hard mud, up towards the house, the fish held high between us, still twisting on the line.

Snake in the Grass

Claire Corbett

I bake on the smooth clay of dried creek-bed. Soak in light the colour of sandstone. Sun-heavy air. Heat-hushed noon. Stillness, silence, warmth are the things I love. I'm a length of sun-powered muscle, arrowing one way, looping eternally. I love dry country but must drink sometime.

I smell water but as I slide over packed earth to sip from a bowl the scarred dog, who was safely on his chain as Mr Lawson said, breaks it and dashes at me, slavering. His barking, the whirl and stamp of your children, pound through the hard earth, rattling my spine. The children scream and flail at me with sticks. I slip into the woodpile, turn and peer out from its dark safe hollow. Will you,
gaunt, sun-browned bush woman,
Drover's Wife, take it apart, drive me into the open? I can't risk it. Just as the dog's jaws snap on air where my tail was, I vanish under the house. With my jawbone earthed I can hear the dog digging. The digging stops. His sounds all come from one spot now; you've wrestled him back onto his chain.

A dish of milk appears next to the wall. Do I like milk? I have no idea but I'm not foolish enough to be lured into the open so you can break my back with a stick. The myth that we milk your cows shows you see us as sneak-thieves gifted with supernatural cunning. We come into your barns to eat the rats and mice lured there by grain and slop, not to steal your milk. You brought that story with you from another country.

You see nothing but the maze of mirrors you've built, reflecting your own stories at you, stories that wall you within a tight circumference, chain you like your dog, eternally circling the same spot. Stories that blind you with their dazzle, the secondhand light thrown off by eternal reflection. Do you never tire of your endlessly refracting, distorting stories? Do you never want to see what's outside? Do you
never
want to break the glass?

I can tell you one thing: your snake-dreaming is from other deserts and describes very different snakes but you know nothing of the differences between snakes. You tar us all with the same brush.

Come out you evil black brute,
you mutter. To you I'm satanic, cunning. If I seem surprisingly literate, well you said yourself in your sacred book,
Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.

Come out.
Believe me, I'd like nothing more than to get away but my only safety lies in waiting. I am good at waiting, unlike you hot-blooded scurrying mammals, darting here and there, barking, yelling, talking, playing, wasting more energy in a day than I'd use in a month. No wonder it's hard for you to survive out here, your bodies shedding white heat like stars, burning through your fuel. You need so much food! I could eat three mice or rats a week but often don't. I can make do with much less.

As heat fades from the day I sink into torpor. I will wait here under the house till you sleep and then with the last of the day's warmth in my muscles I will slip away.

I've miscalculated.

A storm is blowing up and twilight has fallen sharp and there's so much cold air falling to earth, churning away the day's heat too fast. Usually I have hours of sun-soaked stone and earth to power me. Energy drains from my body; now I'm too slow to dart away to safety. I must keep waiting. I hear you moving your children and dog into the big bark kitchen.

Then I smell it, sense it with every scale and muscle fibre. A little yellow sun crackles and smokes, throwing off energy that radiates into the room and away into the sky. You've built a fire. I need that heat. I slide behind the kitchen wall, watching you through the cracks. The dog turns his head. I freeze. Warmth flows in through the crack. I doze, waiting. You lot must sleep sometime.

No?

No. Adrenaline pulses from you, I taste the metallic taint of it on the air. Your fear keeps you awake. What do you think I will do to your children? You know I can't eat them. Too big a meal for me. We have many hours ahead. If only I could talk my way out of this.

Do you have a name for me? Some call me a King Brown.

Class:
Reptilia.
Order:
Squamata.
Suborder:
Serpentes.
Family:
Elapidae.
Genus:
Pseudechis.
Species:
Australis.

A complex naming but I kind of like it. It's so grand it seems respectful and part of a more hopeful story than the one in your Good Book, in which I am
The Father of Lies.
And I'm no father. Like you, Drover's Wife, I'm a mother. The difference between us is that you want to kill my young.

You should have been an ally. My sister. Another mother.

You've been slandered by the same lies spread about me and my kin.

It is useless to speak. A forked tongue can only tell lies. But even if you could listen to me, you could not hear.

And the Lord God said unto the serpent …
I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed
…

What do you, Drover's Wife, think I am going to do? You think I'd waste my precious venom on your children for … what? Sport? That's your thing. Not mine.

So we've a long night ahead. A night of fear for you and near torpor for me. A long night in which I could plead for my life, a long night in which I could try to persuade you not to kill me.

Could others speak for me? Perhaps the men who worked the ‘Snakepit', where snake-handling shows went on for over a hundred years? Mr Lawson would have known these snake-men in their battered hats and dungarees, their hessian bags and hooked poles. Families flocked to La Perouse on a Sunday to be horrified, thrilled, amazed. They never forgot those shows. The showmen circled the pit, pacing between legend and reality, telling stories of good snakes and bad snakes: my cousin, the Red-Bellied Black, is the good girl who eats Brown Snakes and Tiger Snakes and keeps you safe. They talk up the danger, then play it down, draping Pythons over the shoulders of little girls, handling Tigers and Taipans.

There are those who tell stories. Writers. Artists. Scientists. It takes a story to counteract a story. An antidote if you will. Antivenom.

You cannot know what it costs me to make my venom. Like the spider's web, it is drawn from my body's wealth, made from complex proteins. I cannot waste it. The spider, hated almost as much as I am, must eat her web if it is ruined. She cannot spin it out of nothing.

You call me King Brown but this name is not helpful as I'm classed as a Black Snake. Should you be silly enough to be envenomated by me, you'd need Black Snake antivenom, not Brown. The Drover, your husband, would likely call me a Mulga Snake. His mates further west would call me a Pilbara Python. My mob ranges over more of Australia than any other snake and in some places we look black. Such a drab description tells you nothing of my subtle beauty, of the way each scale is lighter-toned at the edges, netting me in gold. Enamelled, I shimmer as I move.

Average length
: 1.5 metres up to maximum exceeding 2.7 metres.
Description
: Broad head, bulbous cheeks, large scales.
Colour
: Varies from light to dark brown, coppery red to almost yellow. Southern specimens darker, sometimes nearly black.

We park at Hargreaves Lookout. Alone at the lookout, I stare down into the blue-green valley framed by pink cliffs. I turn to walk back and stop. About five metres away a large snake lies right across the path. Must be a King Brown. I've seen my share of Red-Bellied Black Snakes but this snake is brown-gold and big. I'm not afraid but I'm not about to step over it either. I wait, watching in fascination as it basks on the warm sand. After a few minutes the snake glides away into the bushes. A few weeks later I learn this snake is indeed a King Brown and a celebrity.

Venom
: LD50 = 1.9 yield: 180mg. King Brown Snakes can express enormous quantities of venom. The actions of the venom are mainly haemolytic (destructive to red blood cells); cytotoxic (poisonous to cells); and also mildly neurotoxic (poisonous to nerves) and mytotoxic (poisonous to muscles).

Specific antivenom
: Black Snake.

Initial dose
: 18,000 units.

Special feature
: King Brown Snake venom has a devastating effect on other venomous snakes but the King Brown appears to be immune itself to the venom of other snakes. It is not immune to the Cane Toad.

Food
: Rats, mice, lizards, other species of snakes. Eggs. Birds. Carrion.

I learn more about this King Brown from a story in the local newspaper. The snake is a mother well-known to locals, who often see her at the lookout. Their unobtrusive respect leads to her death. Despite the King Brown's fearsome reputation, she is known to be inoffensive. But as happens to many wild animals who learn not to fear humans, this snake was unafraid of the wrong humans, men who kill her, breaking her back, destroying her eggs. I grieve, having seen her so briefly. Our untrustworthiness is even more shameful than our cruelty. If we were consistently kind – or even consistently aggressive – she might have survived.

Venom toxicity rating
: Lethal Dose (LD) calculated as the dose resulting in the death of 50 per cent of test subjects. Which are mice.

You boast we're the world's most venomous snakes. It's true Australian snakes are very venomous: to mice and rats. You don't have a good way of testing how toxic my venom is and so you test it on rodents. Not surprisingly, my venom is fatal to them because they're the very prey it was designed for. I doubt I'm as dangerous to you; mice are not necessarily a good guide. After all, adult mice don't react to funnel-web venom. I wouldn't rely on that mob if I were you.

We're the demons alright. We've even been used to strike fear into the hearts of refugees. Your government made three videos to show people who might try to sail to Australia the horrors of a land surrounded by sharks, burnt by fire and infested with venomous snakes. I feel such videos say more about you, Drover's Wife, than about Australia. In countries where people have lived with snakes for a long time, they coexist well. The Cobra coils under the house, the Python sleeps in the rafters, keeping down the rats.

Cobra venom is rated 1 on the scale of toxicity. My cousin, the Inland Taipan, is rated 49.5 or nearly 50 times more venomous than the Cobra. I myself am thought less dangerous only than the Taipan, not for toxicity but for the amount I inject. Our reasons are good for having so much venom and making it so potent. We used to be massive constricting creatures, like the Anaconda or the Boa. We don't need all that muscle now; our venom means we can be lighter, faster.

Just as well your mob never met
Wonambi
; those fellas grew up to six metres long, as long as a small bus. They lived in Australia from one hundred million years ago until about thirty thousand years ago. Some say Wonambi inspired tales of the Rainbow Serpent.

Then there's
Titanoboa,
a monster rivalling Leviathan, Typhon, the Midgard Serpent. A prehistoric South American snake 43 metres long, or almost as long as an Olympic swimming pool, she weighed in at a mighty 1140 kilograms. You might want to consider this though: as the climate warms we snakes grow larger.

If those fellas were still around you'd really have something to be scared of.

Another reason our venom is so potent: we are not Vipers.

That wouldn't mean much to you, Drover's Wife: a snake is a snake is a snake … But Vipers, which don't exist in this country, kill many more people across the world than Australian snakes do. Vipers have folding teeth. They pack them away neatly in their mouths and then when they strike the fangs spring up and out, a far more efficient venom delivery than my cousins and I use.

Our fangs are fixed so we must bite our prey. Some part of its flesh must be between our upper and lower fangs for the venom to be injected. Would it help if I told you my teeth are quite small? They can't penetrate jeans or shoes. A simple strike will not do for us. Many of our strikes fail or are intentionally ‘dry'. We're just warning you. Go away. Leave us alone.
Don't tread on me.

Which brings me back to you, Drover's Wife. Do you have a name? You call me a black brute – seems to me there are quite a few black brutes that you and that Drover husband of yours would prefer not to have around cluttering up the landscape. I am also described as having ‘an evil pair of small, bright beadlike eyes'.

You should have been an ally.

The same snake-hating religion that said you were the door for all evil into this world said the same of me. I'm a snake, no symbol for anything. You are a woman, no symbol for anything.

I am curled up behind your wall, not inside your kitchen. If I come out at night to hunt I won't bite you or your babies. I can smell where you are and though I'm no Pit Viper, with their oh-so-fancy heat-locating facial pits, I can still feel your heat. That's how I know your size and that I can't eat you. If you stopped to think about it, Drover's Wife, you'd see I'm a blessing to your hut, to your shed, to your barn, eating the vermin, the rats and mice that destroy your food and spread disease. Your farmers are finding that the more of us they kill, the more severe the plagues of rats and mice eating their crops. You protect your crops in one way, destroy them in another.

People in India live with Cobras under their homes. Cobras are powerful, good luck. If you can't see us without a symbol standing in between us, let us be like the Cobra. Let us be Shiva, destroying, regenerating. Let us be protectors of the Buddha, bringers of rain, thunder, fertility. Carved in Hawkesbury River sandstone, we will guard the entrances to your temples, your churches. Your churches! Imagine. You could celebrate the lunar holiday of Nag Panchami and refrain from your ploughing and field work out of respect for us.

We are cosmic, ranging across the universe. Scientists recently described the Milky Way as ‘a pit of writhing snakes'. Giant rivers of turbulent gas, coiling their way across the deep, show up on a radio telescope image as ‘gas snakes'. Your scientists are persistent, I'll give them that. Took them thirty years to capture an image of the gas snakes. Cosmic gas snakes help stars form, make the galaxy and the universe magnetic and spread warmth around. How appropriate. We snakes all need heat from the stars.