I forget exactly where it was, but my wife and i were in the Northern Territory of Australia, forty or fifty miles off the graded road and not a sign of another human between us and the horizon. We made a fire and enjoyed a good meal of stuff we had picked up a day or two back down the road. Getting ready to retire to our tent, I went to the pile of dry wood we had gathered from the surrounding scrub to load the fire for the night and as I lifted a skinny log a snake, about five feet long, scrolled out of the pile. We kept a close watch on it as it described almost a complete circle around the fire before disappearing back into the pile of wood. We waited for at least 15 minutes to see if if made another move. There was very little light available but what there was disclosed a pattern on the snake's skin that was very close to that of one of the most poisonous species in the outback, so I wasn't about to try chasing it away. Eventually, I said the hell with it, let's turn in for the night, and we crawled into the tent. We snuggled in our sleeping bags, turned out the battery-powered light and went to sleep. About an hour later, I would guess, I woke up. There was something beneath the groundsheet under my neck that felt, when I put my hand on it, like a sturdy rope in the sand. And then it moved, just a tad. At this point I knew it was our snake friend, who had obviously been drawn to the warmth of our fire in the midst of the cold desert night and had now come to share my body heat. Something told me that this was all the critter was looking for, my fear left me and I went back to sleep, on top of the snake. In the morning when we arose an hour or so after daybreak, the ropy companion was gone.

When I thought about this incident, and my reaction, I realized that I had already had so many hairy encounters with deadly spiders, scorpions and jelly fish in Australia that I just couldn't muster the standard human freak out one more time. They have a saying down there, that if the mosquitoes don't get you the spiders will, and if the spiders don't get you the sharks will, and if the sharks don't get you the snakes will, and so on. It is probably the only country on the planet that rivals the United States for vast and spectacular scenery, but the Aussies have developed a respect for the immense danger that lies beyond the thin margins of their "civilization" that I don't see here. They have figured out how to live the good outdoor life, serviced to an almost Disneyesque level of playground comfort, as long as they keep to the edges of the great boiling menace in the heart of their continent.

Last Edited By: Win80 03/26/13 11:39 PM. Edited 1 times.