ORANGEVILLE CITIZEN (Ontario) 29 November 07 With Your Permission - If it had been a python, we'd have named him Monty (Constance Scrafield-Danby)
Colin's brother, Gerard, was up on the roof, sweating over the steep angle of the peaks, trying to get to the chimney to clean it. The roof in question is atop our recently rented house in the Hockley Valley.
Looking at and then into a nearby vent, Gerard called out, "There's a snake in the vent." He took a closer look. "It's a boa constrictor," he told us. Having said which, he began to climb down off the roof. As he descended, we called his bluff; we absolutely did not believe him. He is famous, after all, for the distinctive Danby humour: "You're kidding, aren't you? No way, we don't believe you."
Slipping down the slope of the roof, he insisted, "There's a snake in that vent. I saw it. I touched it. It's a boa." He could not say for sure whether it was dead or alive. And then he came down the ladder. This was Sunday.
Monday morning, I called several people. The landlady, who is a Chinese person living in Toronto. She acts as the agent for the ten or so people who own the property speculatively from distant Hong Kong. There have been plenty of problems with this property over their years of ownership, but this was her first snake. To say she was surprised is the most minimal of understatements.
Next, after some consultation, I telephoned the SPCA which auto answered with another telephone number for emergencies. Responding to this number was a perky young woman, Lindsay Ward, who said she would come out to the house, even declining my directions. "I'll find the place," she declared, "I'll find the place."
A graduate of the Owen Sound campus of Georgian College, where she studied a police foundation course, Lindsay went on to courses which qualified her to handle wild life emergencies for the SPCA. This was her third snake call in the two and a half years she has been doing this work in Orangeville. The other two were hallucinatory, one as a result of drugs and the other, a bad night's sleep. She brought heavy gloves and a cosy bed sheet, blue with teddy bears.
We were joined by the Citizen's intrepid new reporter/photographer, Paul Hutchings, who was at her heels as she made her own way up the ladder to the steep slopes of the roof. She straddled the peak by the vent and poked at the snake inside. No response. So, we passed her up a screwdriver with which she broke away enough of the vent to enable her to reach the reptile and ease it out of its place.
The snake made no movement as she held it up and then placed it tenderly in her warm blue sheet, held it to her and began to ease her way back to the ground.
Once she and the snake were back on terra firma, we had a good look at it. Some five feet in length and as thick as a woman's arm, it had all the distinctive markings of a boa. We could still not absolutely confirm whether it was in a state of hibernation or actually dead. Lindsay bundled it up and carried it to her vehicle. The following day, she called me to say that the poor old snake was definitely dead. The vet had tried unsuccessfully to find a heart beat and a night in the warmth of heat lamps had not revived it.
Discovering the snake in the first place had - a tiny bit - given me pause for worry Sunday night. I don't know that I am afraid of reasonably large snakes but I am not anxious to unknowingly have one living in my home, whether it consumes the mice in the walls or not. At two in the morning, there were -albeit unreasonable - visions of a snake curled comfortably in my bed.
Lindsay tried to reassure me.
"These snakes are worth about $3,500," she instructed me. "So, it's very unlikely there would be two of them."
As to how it came to be at liberty in the house at all, she said, "Snakes are very smart and very strong.
They can stand on a quarter of their length and are often strong enough to lift the lid of their aquariums and escape." However, there was no sign among the refuse of the house of an aquarium and no contacting the last person to have lived in the house. So, there is no way of knowing how the snake came to be in the house in the first place and if it was the only one.
However, the energetic Lindsay Ward assured me, "The likelihood of their being anything else, is very slim to none."
Interesting odds.
If it had been a python

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