At the back of the house on Coring Road, Siobhan found a long green and black snake with a thick body. It looked dangerous at first until I told her to stab it with her knife so that it could not bite us.
The first cut she made was three inches of its tail.
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‘That’s not good enough, it will grow back!’ I said, so she had another go as it tried to wriggle away from us in the backyard.
At the second attempt she made a slit along the length of the snake four inches along the top of its body, tracing its black and green stripes. (For some reason the snake’s stripes followed the length of its body in ribbons rather than circulating its body in bands.)
Except Siobhan’s cut did not draw more blood than a trickle so on her third try she wrestled down its head and cut into the thickest part of the snake which was some five inches in circumference. And she cut in so that the flesh was fully revealed, a white and red spongy substance that surrounded its central spine.
Siobhan could not cut into the spine. She stopped, one half of its body sliced open and the other half, below its spine, still attached.
‘We need to box it up,’ I said with an overall feeling of sadness.
Siobhan reached for a large clear plastic Tupperware and together we stuffed the snake into the box and firmly attached the lid so that it was squeezed in further and unable to move.
Photo of the harmless Eastern ribbon snake via Animalia.
