On a daring move, Tess Guthrie found the courage to fight a two-meter python off her young daughter's arm.
According to the DailyMail, on an early Saturday morning, Ms Guthrie, from Lismore in northern New South Wales, woke up as apparently her cat wouldn't stop hissing. Although it was still dark, she was able to figure out that it was actually a snake next to her.
Lighting up her cell phone, she saw a snake wrapped around the arm of her two-year-old daughter Zara, who was asleep.
"Automatically, I jumped," she said.
"I don't know if my movement startled the snake, but that's when it started to constrict around her arm and then it just started to strike at her, and it got her three times."
"And on the third time [it was biting down on her] I grabbed the snake on the head I pulled her and the snake apart from each other."
"In my head I was just going through this unbelievable terror, and my thought was that it was going to actually kill her at first, because it was wrapped so tight."
Ms. Guthrie threw the snake across the room and ran like hurriedly to her father's house, according to the forementioned website.
"Her little arm was bleeding really bad from the bites, and all I could feel was blood and Zara was screaming by that stage, and I was in hysterics because it was such a shocking thing to wake up to," she said. "It was just terrifying."
"I don't know how ... I was able to pull it off."
Both mother and daughter were taken to Lismore Base Hospital, where Ms. Guthrie works as a receptionist. They spent the night there.
Tex's Snake Removals' Tex Tillis, who took the reptile away, said the coastal python or carpet snake was rather looking for a "group hug" instead of food.
"Pythons, underneath their bottom lip have a row of sensors which evolution has equipped them with to see the world in infrared. In the dark, baby and mother sleeping in the bed would look like a lump of heat," Mr Tillis said.
Once the python was attacked it started to constrict, Mr Tillis explained.
"That snake, if it was bigger, could have crushed the baby. It could have tried to eat the baby, yes," he said.
"And when mum went to save [the child] it could have wrapped her hands like the best police manacles around ... and then thrown a loop around her neck and killed her. It's all in self-defense."
This python was between five and 10 years old and about six foot long, Mr Tillis said.
Mr Tillis advised parents who find themselves in a similar situation to immediately turn on the light.
"And then what you really have to do is grab the snake ... just below his head so it immobilizes his jaw," he said.
Ms. Guthrie wants the reptile to be released back into the wild.
"The other remarkable thing about this woman is that she had no malice towards the snake," Mr Tillis said.
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