The Net by the River

The river patrol found him at first light — a fisherman’s call, gruff and embarrassed. “There’s a snake in my net,” he said, then a long pause. “A big one.” Another pause. “It’s tangled up bad. I didn’t — I wasn’t trying to catch it. The net’s been in the water since the flood. I just came to pull it in.” You could hear the shame in his voice, and I liked him immediately for it.

We get calls like this every monsoon season. The river rises, the fishermen set their nets, and the river’s other residents — the ones with scales — get caught in the crossfire. This time it was a python, a big one, maybe three meters of muscle and patterned gold, wrapped in a ghost net on the muddy bank.

A ghost net is a fishing net that’s been lost or abandoned. It keeps fishing long after the fisherman is gone — for fish, for birds, for turtles, for anything that swims or slithers into it. This one had snagged on the bank’s roots, and the python had gone in hunting and never come out. Every coil of its body had tightened another loop of mesh. The more it struggled, the worse it got. By the time we arrived, it had stopped struggling. That scared me more than the size of it.

The bank was a mess of roots and mud, the river sliding past, brown and unhurried. Dragonflies stitched the air above the reeds. It was absurdly peaceful for a crime scene. My partner, an old river hand named Duc, crouched beside me and let out a low whistle. “Three meters if it’s a centimeter,” he said. “And every centimeter of it is angry at that net, not at us. Remember that.”

Pythons aren’t venomous, but a three-meter python is still three meters of pure muscle with a hundred teeth, and a stressed wild animal doesn’t do risk assessments. So we worked the way you’re supposed to: slow, calm, two of us, one on the head end with the snake hook, one on the scissors.

I took the head. That’s the job nobody fights over. The python watched me with flat, ancient eyes — not angry, just evaluating. I talked to it the whole time, the same low nonsense I use for everything with a heartbeat. “Easy. Nobody’s hurting you. We’re the un-netting service.”

The first cuts were the worst. The mesh had sawed into the scales along its midsection, and each loop I freed revealed pink, irritated skin underneath — not bleeding, thank god, but raw. The python would tense with each snip, a great slow ripple running down its body, and I’d freeze, scissors open, until it settled. Once it turned its head toward my hand — unhurried, curious — and my heart relocated to somewhere around my throat. Duc kept up a steady murmur from the tail end: “Easy, beautiful. Easy.” Whether he meant the snake or me, I never asked.

Cutting a net off a python is like defusing a knot that fights back. Every snip had to be careful — the mesh had bitten into its scales in a dozen places, and one wrong cut would mean blood. My partner held the coils steady while I worked the scissors under the mesh, millimeter by millimeter, for the better part of an hour. The sun climbed. The river gurgled past. The python breathed — slow, deep, patient breaths — and waited.

When the last loop came free, it didn’t bolt. It just lay there on the mud, uncoiling slowly, testing its body the way you test a limb that’s been asleep. Then it lifted its great patterned head, tasted the air with its tongue — once, twice — and flowed down the bank and into the water like poured honey. Gone.

We logged it the way the patrol requires: species, length, location, condition. Duc took photos for the record — the net coiled beside the bank like a shed skin, the slide marks where three meters of muscle had poured itself back into the river. “You know,” he said, hauling the ghost net into our boat, “ten years ago we’d have just cut the snake loose and left the net. Now we take the net too. Progress is slow, but it floats.”

We named him Luoi — the Vietnamese word for “net.” It seemed right: he was the net’s prisoner and its survivor both. The fishermen’s cooperative got a lecture from the patrol about ghost nets that day — and, to their credit, they listened. Three of them came back the next weekend with grappling hooks and pulled two more abandoned nets out of the river.

I think about that bank sometimes — the mud, the roots, and three meters of gold-patterned muscle wrapped in green mesh, too tangled to move. It couldn’t bite through. It couldn’t wait it out. All it could do was lie there and hope the struggle hadn’t been for nothing.

And we happened to be close enough to help.

People are afraid of snakes. I understand it — I felt it too, with my hand six inches from its head. But fear is a bad reason to walk past suffering. The work isn’t about liking the animal. It’s about the animal in front of you, and the net around it, and the scissors in your hand.