It was a warm autumn evening, and a warm ocean wind came down the stairs from the upper deck. Summer's vibrancy had faded to a dull heaviness that brought perspiration to the seaman's brow. His muscled, tattooed arms slid the massive metal pipe through two hooks in the cage. The marsupial dozed peacefully, tranquil - tranquilized - on its bed of straw. It would be a long voyage to the new world.

As it opened it eyes, the yearling kangaroo felt her head spin and her body rock. She stood, and fell back into the man-made nest. She lay with her head against the floor for several minutes. Gradually, her head stabilized but her body did not. It was no sickness: she was definitely moving. A large metal bowl of water was bolted to the floor inside her cage, and she watched as the water inside of it rolled to one side of the bowl, then back; roll, then back.

Only 100 days out of her mother's pouch, she had nothing but instinct on which to operate, and instinct was mute in these settings. She balanced herself gingerly, then surveyed the perimeter. She saw something ominous in the unbroken circumference of those black bars, the way a sailor sees dark clouds on the horizon to which he is heading. And like the sailor, she knew she must head into that danger.

Her fleeting vision of danger gave way to a lightning flash of panic. She lunged, behind the force of her mighty hind legs, into the impenetrable bars. Two, three, four times she struck them with her right shoulder. She circumambulated the cage again, and again, until the pain in her right shoulder made itself felt, whereupon she walked back to the bed her captors had made her. In despair, she began to attack the bed - the straw was breakable, malleable, yielding. A couple startled rats fled across the room, slipping effortlessly out of the bars of her cage. Caught up in the power of this act, she didn't at first notice the serpent wending its way along the outer wall beyond her cage.

The seven-foot long, burnt umber coastal taipan blended with the dark, water-stained wooden planks of the old ship. Had the young kangaroo her wits about her, she may have noticed it dart for a scurrying rodent and come up just short, as the rat found refuge in a nook in the wall that the serpent had no desire to enter.

She did not notice the taipan, but the taipan noticed her. And this taipan had gastronomical ambitions beyond the average taipan. Finally tired out, the kangaroo crumpled to the now bare floor. The serpent slithered to the rear corner of the stage, slipped between the bars, and sidled up to the kangaroo's tail. In a moment, the taipan would strike rapidly and repeatedly, injecting its venom; in a moment more, the kangaroo would be convulsing in pain; and if the marsupial could last long enough, kidney failure before inevitable death. The initial strike was only a moment away.

Exhausted, but with its senses heightened through agitation, the yearling felt a sudden coldness as a chill coursing through its overheated body. She whipped her tail swiftly and sent the snake hurtling into the bars of the cage. Half of its length hung outside the cage and half inside over the one horizontal bar running through the center of the hundreds of vertical ones. Temporary suspended, immobile but dangerous with fangs dripping venom, the snake took a strike and then two in her direction. But she kept her distance, cocked her head, and watched the hissing serpent. Instinct told her the predator was helpless, and instinct flexed the tendons of her hind legs; instinct lifted her legs off the strange, unsturdy ground; and instinct drop-kicked the snake against the bars.

The snake hung lifeless from the bars, its body split and its blood dripping onto the wooden beams. The boat rocked, but she no longer noticed it. She rested her head on the floor and rested, awaiting the rest of the journey.