A five-year-old Australian boy survived being bitten, constricted, and dragged into a swimming pool by a three-foot-long python.
Beau Blake was swimming at home when the 3m (10ft) reptile struck, according to his father, who told a local radio station.
Beau’s elderly grandfather dragged the entangled pair from the pool, and his father Ben freed the boy from the animal.
Beau, on the other hand, is in good spirits and has only minor injuries.
“Once we cleaned up the blood and told him that he wasn’t going to die because it wasn’t a poisonous snake… he was pretty good actually,” his father Ben told Melbourne radio station 3AW on Friday about the incident that happened a day earlier.
“He’s an absolute trooper,” Ben added, saying the family – who are based in the coastal town of Byron Bay in New South Wales – would monitor the bite wounds for signs of infection.
Despite the lucky escape, the dramatic saga was still quite “an ordeal”, he said.
“[Beau] was just walking around the edge [of the pool]… and I believe the python was sort of sitting there waiting for a victim to come along… and Beau was it.”
“I saw a big black shadow come out of the bush and before they hit the bottom, it was completely wrapped around his leg.”
With “no self-preservation whatsoever”, Beau’s 76-year-old grandfather Allan jumped in the pool and passed the boy and snake to Ben.
“I’m not a little lad… [so] I had him released within 15-20 seconds,” Ben said.
Ben then held on to the python for about 10 minutes as he desperately tried to calm his children and his father, before releasing the snake back into the vegetation.
“He went back to the scene of the crime, the naughty thing.”
Ben told the radio station pythons were a fact of life in the area, about 8 hours north of Sydney, saying “look…it is Australia”.