TheBanyanTree: The Speewah Snake Circus

[Sally Larwood]

Love these tall tales Peter!

Sal 

Sent from my iPad 

On 16/08/2012, at 9:17, Peter Macinnis <petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au> wrote:

> 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/