TheBanyanTree: The Speewah Snake Circus

[Jena Norton]

Very enjoyable tall tale!

Jena Norton

-----Original Message-----
From: thebanyantree-bounces at lists.remsset.com
[mailto:thebanyantree-bounces at lists.remsset.com] On Behalf Of Peter Macinnis
Sent: Wednesday, August 15, 2012 4:17 PM
To: thebanyantree at lists.remsset.com
Subject: TheBanyanTree: The Speewah Snake Circus

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.