The black here turned to Carey and pointed upward with his spear to where, half hidden by the dense foliage, a clump of knots and folds upon some interlacing horizontal boughs revealed the presence of a carpet snake, whose soft warm brown and chocolate markings of various shades were strikingly beautiful.
“Ugh! the monster!” exclaimed Carey, shrinking back. “Are you going to kill it?”
“Mumkull, eatum. Good, good,” cried Jackum, and the noise made below roused the sleeping serpent, whose head rose up, showing the mark where the mouth opened, and Carey could see the glistening forked tongue darting in and out through the orifice at the apices of the jaws. And now the creature seemed all in motion, fold gliding over fold, and one great loop hanging down from the bough some fifteen feet above their heads.
“I mustn’t run off,” thought Carey; “but it looks a dangerous brute.”
He stood fast then, and the attack began, the blacks hurling their clubs up at the reptile with such accuracy and force that in less than a minute the creature had been struck in several places, and was striking out with its jaws and lashing its tail furiously.
Another blow from a whizzing boomerang made the creature cease its attempts to get to a safer part of the tree and writhe so violently in a horrible knot of convolutions that it lost its hold upon the branch and came down through the interlacing boughs with a rush and a thud upon the ground.
Here it seemed to see its aggressors for the first time, and, gathering itself up, its head rose with the jaws distended, and it struck at the nearest black.
But his enemy was beforehand. Holding his spear with both hands he used it as a British yeoman of old handled a quarter-staff, and a whistling blow caught the reptile a couple of feet below the head, which dropped inert, the vertebrae being broken, and a series of blows from other spears, one aimed at the tail, finished the business.
The danger was over, and the serpent began to untwine itself, till it lay out, a long heaving mass of muscles, completely disabled and dying after the slow fashion of its kind.
“Why, it must be sixteen or eighteen feet long,” thought Carey, and then he stood looking on while the delighted blacks, who looked upon their prize as a delicacy that would be exclusively their own, cut a few canes, twined them into a loose rope, made a noose round the writhing creature’s neck, and after one of the party had passed this rope over a convenient bough the reptile was hauled up so that the tail was clear of the ground and safe from the attacks of marauding ants.