Pull up the chair, get a beer into your hands, sit down and listen to one of my true trapping stories, it is not a tall story, but in fact; a true yarn from my rabbit trapping days. You know me, I never stretch the truth, you don’t have to, truth is stranger that fiction any time.  

One of my greatest joys (when I about 10 years of age) was to go trapping and shooting with my cousins on the weekends in the bush. One particular hot summer’s weekend I was going around with my older cousins clearing the traps late one afternoon; and re-setting again for the evening catch, on one particular occasion I released a rabbit from a trap and held him tight to my chest, then without warning the rabbit started to kick around and I dropped it; the rabbit immediately bolted for the nearest log and scampered into it.

 Eager to demonstrate my bush skills, I grabbed a skinny long dry stick and started shoving it up the log to see how far the rabbit had gone up, I gave the stick a couple of brisk jabs and withdrew it to inspect the end to see if there was any fur stuck on it, and there was, and the distance seemed close enough for me to reach in and pull the rabbit out of the log by hand.

I lied down on the ground and started reaching into the log to grab the rabbit, reaching up as far as I could I felt some movement, as I was stretching right out to have a grab at the rabbit, guess what? This bloody big black snake started coming out of log right beside my face. Well I don’t have to tell you what my thoughts were at that very moment, but by the time the snake even thought about having a strike at me; I had my arm out of that hole and had got up and run about 20 yards within micro-seconds. I snapped off a green sapling and started belting the bejabbers out of the damn black snake. I missed out on the rabbit, but I did get a nice snake skin belt. Oh! I did get a bloody big fright too.