At nearly two metres long, the dark brown snake lay in an elongated S shape across the high part of the tray. Its small bullet-shaped head was centimetres from Nissa’s tiny pink toes, where they poked out from beneath my jacket. The only sign that the snake was alive came from its intermittently flickering black, forked tongue.
‘Nissa,’ I said softly, ‘stay very still.’
I didn’t know much about snakes but this looked like a bad one. A king brown. Perhaps even a taipan. It must have fallen out of the floating baobab. On all fours, I inched my way up the wet, slippery tray towards it. Nathan reckons that snakes aren’t usually dangerous, unless they’re cornered or threatened. I hoped this one didn’t feel either one of those things.
When I was about a metre and a half from Nissa and the snake, I cautiously rose to my feet. Bracing myself as best I could against the gusting wind and the stinging flurries of rain, I leaned forward and slowly extended my hands towards Nissa, making a bridge with my arms across the deadly S of the snake.
‘I want you to stand up,’ I said, ‘really, really –’
I had been about to say ‘really, really slowly’ when she sprang up into my arms. As she jumped, my jacket fell away from her and landed on the snake. Startled, the reptile coiled out of the way in a quick, fluid slide and finished up with its head resting against my right sneaker.
I froze. Balanced precariously in the sloping tray, Nissa in my arms, the snake at my feet, I was literally too scared to move.
‘Bad man!’ Nissa said in my ear.
Bad snake would have been more appropriate, I thought. Not that the snake had actually done anything bad – yet – apart from being there. And being a snake.
‘Bad man got bang-bang,’ Nissa said.
That was when I noticed that she wasn’t looking at the snake. Her eyes seemed to be directed past me. Towards the cab of the ute.
Uh oh! I thought.
Very slowly, so as not to provoke the snake, I turned my head. And saw, framed in the ute’s rear window, the top half of the kidnapper’s head. Lined up against his right eye was something that looked, at first glance, like two joined pipes, with holes in the ends roughly the size of ten-cent coins.
‘Stay right where you are!’ he said menacingly.