A Snake in a Sack

At the end of an animal-collecting trip in New Guinea, Tim Flannery was waiting for an airplane to take him to Port Moresby. He saw a large group of people coming across the airstrip following two men who carried a large tea chest strung on two poles.

"When they placed it in front of me, I looked through the screened lid," he recalls. "There, inside, was the largest, blackest, and fiercest-looking snake I had ever seen."

It was a 10-foot python, thrusting its head against the chest and the sticking half-inch fangs into the wire mesh.

Flannery wanted to buy the snake, but the chest was too big to fit inside the small plane. The animal would have to be transferred to a burlap sack.

"With dread in my heart . . . I gingerly undid the wire, and with a dash grasped the reptile behind the head. It seemed strangely calm as I withdrew it from the chest.

"Suddenly it threw a coil tightly around my forearm and began to pull its head through my hand. In retaliation, I grasped its tail with my free hand. This stymied it momentarily, but it soon threw another coil round my right knee.

"It was a really strong snake and I seemed to be losing the battle."

Flannery hobbled from one group of local people to another begging for a volunteer to hold the sack so he could put the snake inside it. But they all ran away from him, screaming in terror.

"I was about to resign myself to a dismal end when Ken [a colleague] appeared, attracted by all the screaming. He helped me untangle the monster, then held the sack open as I flung the snake in."

It was decided, after some haggling, to pay for the snake with cans of Ox and Palm corned beef. The price would be the number of cans, which when laid end to end, equaled the length of the snake. The python quickly grew in length to 15 feet and kept growing by the minute.

"When I bluffingly offered to take the reptile from its sack to allow them to obtain an accurate measurement," Flannery said, "they quickly settled for a lesser length."