‘Vatten orm’ — which means ‘water snake’. (I spent six intense months on Swedish lessons just so I could miss trains to Uppsala in the right language.)
A sharp scream alerted me to a nice-sized specimen lying in the morning sun at the top step leading to the all-important sauna.
Natrix natrix, the faux typing error, is also known as the Scandinavian grass snake, and despite my enthusiasm for the serpentine types, I thought the last thing I’d encounter between sauna (please pronounce just for this story as ‘sow-nah’) and surströmming (please watch the first YouTube clip you find) would be a snake.
Well bless my soul. I had to put down my kanelbulle and coffee and struggle out of a lawn chair in the early-spring sun under a blossoming apple tree.
My veritable hosts Satu and Joakim welcomed me to their ‘cottage’ among the spruce and birch forests two hours from Stockholm and explained that a cellar light left on by accident over winter had attracted the snakes.
I did think it was a prank because when I got there, the top step was bare, so poor little Andy saw none.
But Satu can, hell-yeah, scream and snakes have sensitive hearing.
And Swedes don’t prank, not since Ingvar Kamprad first picked up an Allen key and said ‘I have an idea’.
I was commissioned, over fika, to deal with the snake.
By next morning I had caught and released twelve. Twelve.
They were cute things with their golden headband and four ridges down their spine.
With several failed attempts at the first snake under my belt, despite sitting patiently to only have it repeatedly retreat backwards into a tiny hole, I tried it from the step above, with success.
The snake was only so keen on meeting me and as I looked in close at the scales, where you often find a bit of colour change in a few species, I experienced something like nothing else: a shot of musk from two tiny glands under its tail.
My word. In fact I can’t find words to give the odour any justice.
It was a mixture of a very dead possum, my lunchbox on any given first day of school, Uncle Gary’s morning breath when he insisted on making us all breakfast, a litter tray post house-sitter, and an alcoholic’s throw-up.
This odour could have killed flatulence with a glance, and thankfully Sweden partakes in no wars because they’d have nailed biological warfare by 1914.
And it’s little wonder that I found the surströmming tolerable.
I released all the snakes one-by-one as they slithered out of the hole throughout the day, and I did so in an upwind direction, wishing I had packed a space suit — the smell seeped into everything.
One set off across a pond, and while I strolled back after about number five, Joakim said “Oh look. The big one has followed you.”
I also set up a time lapse camera and recorded possibly the first known encounter of two of them intertwined and — thinking it was the end — going out with a bang.
Dreams involving multiple snakes apparently infer three things: toxicity in your life, impending abundance or pregnancy.
Let’s hope it’s the second one, because I experience these dreams regularly — it is very much Indiana Jones, the floor a carpet of snakes and I have no stock whip; in fact I’m usually in underpants.
A large lilac bush beside the cellar door had not yet burst. One of the many dead leaves from the previous winter moved. Then another one. And another.
I had to peer in carefully.
The entire ground under the leafless lilac was a carpet of Natrix natrix.
I had a beer in hand, a la the tradition of enjoying a frothy between each visit to the sauna.
A thin, very light dressing gown gaping at the front was all I had on, my bare feet only inches from the slithering carpet.
And in keeping with another sauna tradition — let’s just say there were no underpants involved.
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