HelloI like stories. No surprise there.
And I've read a couple lately that did surprise me.
The Australian Outback is home to a variety of animals, including snakes. Now, I admit, they are not my favourite living creature, but I know a couple of ripper yarns about snakes I'd like to tell you.
When I was hiking in Borneo two years ago, the guide pointed out a jungle green tree snake. He said, 'When it flicks out it's tongue, that means it has seen you.'
Just when I was hoping to sneek past him!
The guide also said to be careful when we put our hands on railings if there was a walkway as snakes like to lie there as it was smooth and comfortable for them.
When I was holidaying on Brampton Island, in Queensland, a faremer who lived in central Queensland told me he and his wife heard a tremendous noise in his ceiling. He and his wife thought there was a possum up there. He was too busy to check just then, but the next day he got a ladder and climbed up into the ceiling and found a massive snake skin.
But no snake.
The noise had been the snake shedding its old, dry skin.
They never found the snake.
(Snakes shed old skins because the old ones only stretch so far.)
Fishermen have their stories too.
A man at Corny Point, South Australia, told me that he was out fishing from the shore, alone, and had to 'go kick the bushes' so he took off his thigh-high waders and went into the bushes.
He came back a little while later and just as he reached out to pick up his wading boots, a big brown snake slithered out of them.
So always check your shoes or boots before you put them on when you are out bush.
Audrey points this out to her cousin, Jimmy, in 'My Australian Story:Outback'.
What got me thinking about these stories was the account on the ABC website about a student in Darwin who was surprised by what was in his sports bag. Check it out.
Just as strange, from 2008, in Queensland read what a vet. found inside a snake.
I sometimes think writers are like vacuum cleaners, we go around sucking up stories, listening, taking notes, repeating yarns.
'The universe is made of stories, not atoms' - Muriel Rukeyser
The first law of storytelling. … Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it. - Mrs. Humphrey Ward
Happy story telling, Christine Harris
rattler cartoon: Wizard of Draws
