We’re talking snakes. One of the deadliest snakes on the planet, the death adder.
Thus the name. These snakes aren’t sneaky and trying to bamboozle anybody. I appreciate that. A manipulative snake might try to tell you, “Hey, I’m just your friendly neighborhood legless reptile, using my pointed eating instruments and anti-pest chemicals to rid your home and yard of rodents. That bucket over in the corner is if you want to contribute to the cause, but only if you’re happy with my services. Good day to you and the family!”
This snake is honest. “Hello there, good sir, I’m a death adder. Don’t want to bite you, but if I did, yes, you would die within six hours. Quite sorry about that.”
And for some reason, all the death adders for miles keep showing up in this poor couple’s house in Cape York, which is like Cape Fear, except no Robert DeNiro, and it’s on a different continent, and I don’t remember deadly snakes in that movie.
The story says they haven’t had a handful of these snakes show up, which would be plenty. Twenty of these snakes have slithered into their home, which is some kind of Australian ranch in the middle of the bush.
That’s crazy. A normal human being would pack up and drive away.
However, this is Australia, which is another planet, except Elon Musk hasn’t sent rockets to it yet.
This couple is pretty cool with it. The snakes aren’t aggressive–the couple describes them as docile–their dog is really got at sniffing them out, and they’ve got a system of scooting them into a bag with a broomstick and such.
They don’t kill the snakes. I kid you not. These folks drive them far away, let them back out into the wild, and wish them well, when normal humans would do the opposite and go all ALIENS 2.
The final detail that slayed me was experts quoted in the story, trying to figure out why the death adders were showing up.
Apparently, the population of these snakes is recovering, and maybe booming, after they went on a cane-toad binge. See, the cane toads are poisonous, and the poisonous snakes biting and eating them would later die of the toad poison. Which is karmic payback, if you think about it. The scientist think surviving death adders figured it out. Maybe mother and father death adders started reading their baby sneks new bedtime stories, like the book, “An Afternoon Tea with Cane Toads–Our Non-Tasty, Poisonous Cousins.”
The Red Pen of Doom 