TheBanyanTree: The Speewah Snake Circus

[Peter Macinnis]

This is for Mike.  He knows why.

A bit of background.  The snakes are bad on the Speewah. In fact, if the 
Speewah tiger snake bites you, you're dead two minutes before it sinks 
its fangs in. Now that's venomous, but luckily they aren't very big. 
Mind you, people will tell you about "sixty-foot snakes", but there 
wouldn't be a single venomous snake on the whole Speewah that's more 
than 30 feet around the belly. The pythons are larger of course, but 
don't go believing any tall tales about big venomous ones.

Anyhow, I'm back working the Speewah again (long story), and I don't 
think this yarn ever saw the light of day in any of our iterations.  If 
it did, bin this.

* * * *

There weren't that many women on the Speewah, but the ones that were 
there made up for it by the great ideas they used to have. Take the time 
Gentle Annie's Alice and Greasy Smith's second youngest, Gertie decided 
to take some Speewah snakes down to the big smoke and put on a circus show.

They'd thought about doing some acts themselves, but they reckoned party 
tricks like riding a bicycle with three rolls of barbed wire and six 
loose melons was too ordinary. They tried to get Mick to do a strongman 
act for them, but he reckoned they'd be better off with snakes, because 
city folk are both scared of and fascinated by snakes.

The first thing Alice and Gertie did was to sit down and plan the acts 
they could use. First up they had some adding adders, where you would 
ask an easy sum, and the mob of snakes would stick up enough heads over 
the side of the container to give you the answer.

It was a fake, of course, because adders are deaf, and couldn't hear the 
question, but they had a pup, the runt of one of the litters sired by 
Mick's dog, and it could hear all right, and with Mick's dog as its 
father, well of course it could add.

So it'd listen to the question, then nose enough of the adders, which 
would stick their heads up, rather than get nipped on the tail by the 
pup if they didn't do it right. But even if it was a fake, the customers 
wouldn't know it was just a dog doing the sums, and so they'd be impressed.

The next thing they decided on was a snaky equivalent of a lion-taming 
act, and for this, they decided to use a young python they found eating 
scrub bulls in the back paddock. What happened was they were looking for 
a horse that had gone missing, and they thought this python might know 
something about it, so Alice ripped its jaws open, and held it that way 
while Gertie stepped inside, but all she could see there was a scrub 
bull, bellowing and roaring for all it was worth.

It helped that Gentle Annie was there as well, because she held the 
snake's tail, and the next bit was her idea. "Let's see," she said. "The 
tent's only got four 'roo hides in it, so you can fit about four hundred 
people, but you'll never get all of that snake into the ring. It'd be 
best if you train it to open its jaws, then you can bring the front end 
in the entrance, just after you've fed it a bull, because snakes don't 
roar."

"But Mum," said Alice, "people'll know that snakes can't roar…"

Alice cut her off. "It's all about belief. Yeah, city folk might think 
snakes can't roar, but they don' know about snakes that can swallow a 
bull. They'll never guess that the roar they hear is coming from a bull, 
not the snake."

Gertie being the small one, she got the job of being the tamer of what 
they now called "Grendel, the world's biggest worm", which was a bit of 
a fake, seeing as how it was really a python, and most people sort of 
knew that worms didn't have two-metre teeth, but it still looked 
impressive. Mind you, they could see a problem if they had to do 
matinees, because it took Grendel a full day to digest a bull, but in 
the end that wasn't a problem, after all.

Next up, they wanted a high-wire act. That was easy, because they had 
some of the Speewah plaiting snakes. These are the only little snakes 
that can frighten off the big snakes in the back paddock, and that's 
because they plait themselves together into a whip, and lash any big 
snake that comes near them.

Now plaiting snakes are highly intelligent, so Annie rounded some up and 
explained what was on offer: a chance to see a bit of the country, free 
milk, plenty of frogs, and a chance to give Grendel a free lashing at 
any matinee performance. Of course, they'd need fancy uniforms, but the 
rest of the plaiting snakes had a whip-around, and in no time at all, 
they had lashings of cash.

Mind you, Grendel wasn't too happy about the idea, because he'd had a 
few encounters with plaiting snakes in his young life, but that was no 
problem. The girls just got Gentle Annie to come around and smile at 
him, and he decided the whole idea had a lot of merit, and it was only 
for matinees, to get over the undigested bull problem.

Anyhow, the plaiting snakes were ideal for the high wire, but they 
worked themselves into a bigger routine, where they started out as a 
trapeze act, and swung back and forth, adding more snakes to the plait, 
then whipping up to tie off on the other post. It was a mistake for the 
girls to agree to this, because the plaiting snakes used this as an 
excuse to get more of their family into the show, and that was the first 
sign of the disaster that was to come.

There was another warning sign when they tried to get some drop bears to 
ride tiptail snakes. These tiptails are completely harmless, and only 
eat wild grapes and spinifex seeds. The thing is, when the wind gets up, 
the seeds blow around pretty fast, so tiptails need to be even faster, 
and they rear up and race along on just the tip of their tail, cutting 
down on friction.

Well the drop bears'd ride the tiptail snakes all right, but the first 
time the snakes reared up on their tails, two of the bears went feral, 
and bit the tiptails on the neck. And even though Mrs Greasy Smith had 
filed down the bears' teeth for them, it still hurt the tiptails.

Now I know I said the tiptails are harmless, but they also have a very 
mean streak and a nasty sense of humour, especially when something 
annoys them. I've seen more than one horse rider chased by tiptails 
after taking a horse over a tiptail nursery, and there's nothing more 
upsetting than galloping full speed, and having four hissing snakes 
keeping pace either side of you, four more behind you, and a couple of 
smaller ones jumping over your head and grinning at you as they pass by.

But while you can bluff a horse rider, drop bears have no imagination at 
all, so what the tiptails did was to race around the practice ring, 
faster and faster, and then lean out and bash the drop bears against the 
poles. Quite a few of them died, but none of the survivors learned to 
behave any better.

So given the time it took to catch a drop bear alive and file its teeth, 
and how hard it is, looking after a convalescent drop bear, it just 
wasn't worth it. So the tiptails were reduced to doing gymnastics and 
precision high diving, but people had seen all that before. Flash Jack 
reckoned they ought to get the tiptails riding the drop bears, saying 
they could call it bear-back riding, but the girls wouldn't be in it.

Anyhow, Flash Jack had been telling the girls about hoop snakes for 
years, and they were never sure whether he was having a lend of them or 
not. So now they put the word on him to put up or shut up, and he had to 
admit that there weren't any such animals.

That was no problem to Gertie. She went out and collected four young 
taipans — had to kill the mother, of course, but she got the young ones 
before they knew they were snakes, and brought them up with another 
litter of pups, fairly bright little pups they were, too, second cousins 
of Mick's dog, and the snakes grew up thinking they were long skinny dogs.

But as cattle workers, the taipans were a dead loss, because every time 
they nipped a bull in the heels, it'd die. No worries, though, Gertie 
took them and trained them to hold their tails carefully in their 
mouths, with the poison fangs either side of the tail. Then she helped 
them get upright, and tried to get them to hoop along, but they just 
couldn't manage it, so all they could do in the end was run them down a 
ramp and across the ring, or wheel them around the ring.

The juggling snakes were pretty good as well, and the strong snake act 
was Grendel's tail, coming in through a flap in the roof — it brought 
the house down once or twice until they got the cross-bracing right, and 
the snakes on unicycles were brilliant.

The snake charming wasn't much good though, as they had some of the 
adding snakes playing a tuba between them, two on the mouthpiece, and 
one on each key with Gertie coming out of the basket, but they forgot 
that all the adders were deaf, so nobody enjoyed it much, except the snakes.

But in the end, the whole show went broke. You see, you can't really 
have a circus without clowns, and there was just no way you can keep a 
red nose on a snake, because the elastic kept slipping off. So after all 
that effort, Alice and Gertie had to let the snakes go back into the 
bush again, where all of the snakes, including the adders, multiplied.

Still, circus training dies hard, and even today, you can find 
cooperative groups of plaiting snakes driving scrub bulls into the 
mouths of a large old python in the Speewah back paddock, assisted by a 
couple of taipans which sometimes seem to let out just the hint of a 
yelp. You'll know the python straight off, as he's only got one tooth 
left. He'll probably answer to 'Grendel', but only if you speak up.

You'll also come across some adders that pop their heads up over a log 
to look at you if you shout out a sum, but you have to shout real loud. 
So I suppose the snakes got something out of it, even if the girls didn't.

Mick was able to use the tent, though. He turned it over, put loops 
around the base, and made it into a dilly-bag to carry his spare shears, 
axes and a bit of a snack when he was heading off somewhere, and Gertie 
and Alice took Greasy's second bullock team out on the road for a spell 
till they got over their disappointment.

It was hard on the bullocks though, because Greasy just said to take 
them out on the road, and the ladies assumed he meant them to carry the 
bullocks and the bullocks got embarrassed after the first fifty miles, 
but that's another story.



-- 
Peter Macinnis           petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au
Breeder of Pedigreed racing leeches (GT stripes extra)
centipede farrier  (special bulk rates for millipedes)
http://oldblockwriter.blogspot.com/