Story Time With Ruby

Don't Cross The Brown Snake

My Dad's side of the family owns a shack. A rickety old thing that has been in the family for four generations, complete with an outdoor dunny that's always filled with spiders. ALWAYS. I hated going in there. Back to what I was talking about, the shack. Our shack was just outside of a logging track, leading to the vast amounts of bushland filled with gumtrees and bluegum, wallabies and possums also with the occasional Tassie devil (there black not brown and they don't make a tornado where ever they go thank-you-very-much). 

My Dad's side of the family (consisting of my dad, my aunt, my uncle, My cousins, Nan, and Pop), love to take long hours of bushwalking along that track and it quickly became my favorite track at the shack. Hey, that rhymes! But in the spring and summer, the snakes come out and say g'day. Oh great. So everyone who wants to walk needs to be extremely careful at all times.

My Cousins names will not be said so let's call them Peaches and Ant. Peaches, Is the same age as me and we get along pretty well and at the shack, we spend all our time together doing random things and (my personal favorite, making mud cakes and other mud things) bushwalking together with Ant or my Aunt. This time Peaches and I wanted to walk ourselves, like the responsible ten-year-olds we wanted to be. So, Peaches went and got the snake emergency bag and together we told the adults where we were going and when we were coming back, then headed off to the tracks. It went good at the start, got halfway down the track and then disaster struck. Peaches froze. I kept walking, and then stopped when Peaches started yelling at me to stop. I stopped and turned to look at her and her face was a chalky white, she whispered to me 'Brown snake'. I was all like 'Where?' and she said she saw it slither in front of her. I said to stay calm, (she was not staying calm at all, She started hyperventilating and crying) and start to call out for our parents. 

After a while (probs ten minutes at best) of screaming at the top of our lungs for help, One of the adults (I can't remember who) came and took us back to our safe warm shack, away from big brown snakes. We told the adults what happened and why we were screaming for help and Nan replied with-

'After a while, it [your screaming] started to sound distressed, we all thought you two were playing' 

Turns out that the snake was a baby copper head, one of Tasmania's deadliest snakes!