5-Year-Old Attacked by Python, Pulled Into Pool

An Australian boy has survived the unthinkable: being bitten then constricted by a 10-foot-long python and then tumbling into a swimming pool with the snake attached. Beau Blake's family says the 5-year-old had been walking around a home pool when father Ben "saw a big black shadow come out of the bush and before they hit the bottom, it was completely wrapped around his leg." The BBC reports Beau's 76-year-old grandfather jumped in the pool, grabbed the boy and snake, and handed them to Ben. "I'm not a little lad... [so] I had him released within 15-20 seconds," Ben says.

"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," recounts Ben, who said the snake was released to a garden near their home in Byron Bay in New South Wales. Ben sounded unfazed, noting "it's snake season" and saying that in the 36 years his father has lived on the property, they only spotted snakes about 10 times, reports the Guardian, which has photos of the snake and bite marks here. The New Zealand Herald has the dad's theory: That the snake was waiting in the garden for a "victim," like a bird, to pass by, and launched at his son instead. (More pythons stories.)