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A MANS WORST FEAR
By FaynerIsBack | June 13, 2008
Daryl Zutt was on a pig hunting and fishing trip with a friend in northern Queensland when he pulled over by the side of the road.
Crouching down to answer nature’s call, he felt a sharp sting to his manhood. Moments later he saw a brown snake – one of the world’s most venomous species – slither out from between his legs.
Mr Zutt, a carpenter from Cairns, has since been bombarded with jokes about trouser snakes, but he said at the time he thought his life was about to end.
“I thought I was gone. I thought, ‘Maybe, this is it. Maybe, I’m gonna cark it’.
“I squatted down – I reckon I must have nearly sat on his head,” he said.
“As soon as I felt it, I yelled. It really hurt. When it happened, I knew in the back of my mind it was a snake. I seen him coming out from between my legs.
“He got me about halfway down. I saw fang marks and a bit of blood come out.”
Mr Zutt said he used a cold can of rum and coke to help soothe the pain, and rang his mother on a mobile phone to say a final goodbye.
Details of the almost fatal encounter were revealed by The Cairns Post a fortnight ago but at the time the victim’s identity was not known.
It was only today that Mr Zutt decided to come forward and recount his close encounter on the rugged and sparsely populated Cape York Peninsula.
He shouted out to his mate, who drove him to the nearby settlement of Lakeland to find medical help.
By the time the pair arrived, Mr Zutt felt nauseous and had stomach cramps. “I couldn’t talk properly. I was tongue-tied,” he told The Cairns Post.
He was treated by a paramedic and taken to hospital in nearby Cooktown, named after Capt James Cook.
Tests revealed that although the snake had drawn blood, its venom had not entered his system.
He said the jokes started as soon as his mates knew he was going to be alright.
“They’ve been saying things like ‘It was a trouser snake fight’ and ‘He [the snake] saw the competition and got scared’”.
The common brown snake has the second most potent venom of any land snake, after the inland taipan, also found in Australia.
About 3,000 Australians are bitten by snakes each year, but on average there are only one or two deaths because most victims receive antivenom.
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