Deadly Pursuit

Deadly Pursuit

He walked to the door with a cardboard box under his arm; laying it down while he unlocked the three bolts and the padlock.

The inner room was the size of an average suburban front room. One wall had been removed and replaced with a heavily re-enforced, plate glass window so that the room could be seen from the viewing platform outside.

He released the clasp on the box and pulled a buck hare out by the ears. It weighed in excess of twenty pounds. There was plenty of meat on him. The hare kicked out, furious and scared. All the time he was screeching and kicking with his strong hind legs. His best attack was his back legs and high pitched, keening scream.

With a deftness that comes of practice, the man broke the hare's hind legs over his knee. The animal’s scream changed pitch. It made a noise sickeningly like that of a human baby in pain. It writhed beneath the man’s grip but there was no escape.

Without giving the hare another glance he threw it into the middle of the room and walked out, locking the doors behind him and rattling each of the three locks to ensure that they were secure.

He went to the viewing benches to watch the wonder of nature at her most cruel. He’d seen it hundreds of times before, but each kill was different and the thrill of it never left him.

The hare sensed death the instant its broken legs touched the floor. It touched and immediately jumped into the air as if the floor was electrified. Despite it's crushed legs it ran round the room, using its front legs and dragging its hind quarters limply behind. Looking for escape and finding none, it cowered in the farthest corner shaking and trembling.

The room belonged to the Boids.

It was the home of the twelve foot plus Boas and Pythons. Tessa, the Common Boa, had already fed, as had Lotus and Bambi, two of the Burmese Pythons. They should all have been fed separately, and the ones who had taken prey should have been removed from the vivarium. It was basic husbandry that snakes should never be fed in the same vivarium. This man didn’t follow the rules. Ebakaneza, a fourteen foot, Reticulated Python moved his head.

He lazily flicked his tongue, sniffing the air with disinterest. Angling his head, he used his tongue to taste the air towards the various corners of the massive vivarium until he caught the scent of the hare in the far corner. Without any outward sign or movement, his demeanour changed. Now, he was interested. In that second he’d changed from docile pet to predator.

He moved towards the smell of the petrified animal. There was nothing lazy about his tongue now. It was flickering with lightning rapidity, sensing out the hare, smelling and tasting the air. He got within three feet of the wounded
prey, it jumped high landing on the snakes back. The snake hissed and recoiled furiously. It lunged at the hare, just missing it as the hare bounced all over the room in a blind, screaming panic. It landed on Bamboo.

She uncoiled and made a half hearted lunge at the terrified creature.

The hare found another corner and crouched low, panting, its eyes bulging with fear. It swayed, never taking its eyes off the snake that was making it's unhurried way towards him. The hare instinctively knew which of the huge snakes was the biggest threat to him. He never looked at the others but kept his eyes riveted on Ebby.

The next strike was intended to mean business. Ebby got within striking distance of the hare and he held it with his gaze, psyching it out,freaking it. The hare was mesmerized. It gave a few warning thumps with its smashed hind legs but its eyes never left the snakes.

Fourteen foot long with a girth of fifteen inches, Ebby was a big Python and had a lot of growing still to do. The hare swayed, mesmerised beneath Ebby's glare.

As suddenly as it had begun, the dance of death was over. Ebby had a tongue flicking smell of the hare and lunged. Only the last foot of his body moved. His huge mouth, opened over a foot wide to reveal, pure white convex fangs. The strike was as fast as the blink of an eye. He grabbed the hare by the throat and rapidly coiled his immense body
four times around hare.

The hare screamed. It kicked out weakly with its broken back legs but it only fought against air. The snake was too experienced and wily to leave part of his body where it could be kicked and clawed.

Holding the hare tightly by the neck, the snake loosened his coils a hair’s breadth, allowing the hare the luxury of an inhalation. The hare gasped greedily for air, taking in a huge lungful, then, before it could exhale, Ebby went in for the death cuddle.

He tensed all of his muscles and increased the pressure around the hare, tightening his coils and pulling them into a taut blanket around the dying animal’s body. The hare knew that it was hopeless. It gave up

struggling and waited for death to relieve it of its suffering. Its eyes bulged deeply out of their sockets as the pressure was increased.

The animal's internal organs were crushed long before it went limp. The Immense coils gradually increased the pressure on the hare’s heart. It took it over ninety seconds to die in agony. The Python increased his hold for a further three minutes. A kill was to be savoured by both the snake and the the man watching.

From the second Ebby had made the first coil, his gastric acids had been building in his gut, preparing to break down the flesh, fur and bones of the hare.

A minute after it was dead, he pulled his long curled fangs from deep in the hare’s neck. The fangs are designed like hooks so that when they enter their prey, they curl forward making them impossible to dislodge and securing the snake’s grip. The fangs made a loud popping sound as they came out of the kill’s neck.

He uncurled, looking at his prey. None of the other snakes paid any attention to what was going on.

The snake moved over the body of the hare several times. Much as a mortician measures his corpse, so Ebby measured his kill. He nudged it with his blunt nose down both sides and along its rump, serving two purposes. It straightened the hare out to make it more streamlined, and, it allowed the snake to take a second measurement of his lunch. When he was satisfied with the position and sizing of his meal, he moved, very slowly, towards the hare’s head.

Lining himself up, he raised his own head three inches from the floor and opened his mouth. When he’d stretched his jaws to their maximum, locked position, he moved his lower mandible several times to either side, enabling him to dislocate his jaw so that it fell loosely back as though on a hinge. It looked like yawning as he stretched the dislocated jaw, his mouth opened wider. The Jacob's Organ, a tube that allowed the snake to breathe when his windpipe was completely covered by the carcass of his kill, glistened whitely in the bottom of Ebby’s mouth. He was ready to begin the slow business of swallowing his prey. He took the hare's nose gently into his mouth. The hare’s head was three times larger than his own. The man watching had relaxed after the initial kill, but now he tensed again, ready to intervene if his snake ran into difficulties.

Gradually, by moving his mouth side to side, the hare’s head moved further into the snake’s mouth, until its nose had been taken into Ebby’s neck. Ebby stopped taking the hare down with his mouth and contracted every muscle in his body, squeezing down on the prey. As he squeezed the body of the kill, it moved further into his neck allowing him to take his mouth an inch further down the hare’s body. He opened his mouth wider, stretched it a little further and moved the hare an inch further in. He stopped and then repeated the muscle clenching.

In this way, alternating between mouthing up the hare and using his muscles to manoeuvre it down his gullet, the hare slowly disappeared. By the time the snake had reached the hare’s shoulders, the snake's skin around the bulge of the hare had stretched until it became translucent. From this point onward there was a real danger that he could split.

This was the reason that he’d measured his meal before starting. All of his markings had elongated, much as the pattern on a lycra dress stretches on a too-big body.

It took the snake twenty minutes to swallow the hare and then he lay with the bulge gradually moving down inside him. The man watching could see the hare’s, head, feet and body, through the skin of the snake.

Ebby was sated and would not feed for another two weeks. The man followed the laws of nature as much as possible, as, in the wild, a Burmese python may take a deer and it would be enough to feed him for several months. But in the wild the prey would not have its legs broken or be thrown into a room with no escape. In the wild the prey always had a fighting shot at getting away. This wasn’t in the wild, the snake would just as easily take frozen food but the man had no conscience about what he did.

The black spurs either on side of Ebby’s cloacae dug into the soft substrate. He stretched his dislocated mouth a couple of times in a sideways yawn. Then, with an audible click, he snapped his Jaw back into position before sliding away to hide in the confines of his fibre glass cave. For the next couple of days he would be watchful, dangerous. At this time he was at his most vulnerable. He’d lie in the darkness of the cavern at the far end of the immense room and he would sleep for several days.

The man smiled as he moved away from the Vivarium. He never tired of watching the deadly pursuit.