THINK moving house is tricky enough?
Try it when your pet snake escapes as you’re driving one of Scotland’s busiest roads.
Retired IT specialist Jim Paterson was helping his son Martin move when Magic the corn snake slithered out of her box.
Jim, 63, from South Queensferry, had promised to drive Magic to Inverness.
“I secured her in the tank and set off along the M90,” said Jim.
“But en route to Perth I could feel something at my feet,” said Jim.
“I thought that the floor mat had worked lose and moved it aside with my feet.
“I must have been travelling about 50mph.”
It wasn’t a floor mat, though, it was Magic.
Jim only realised that she was on the loose when he noticed her tail disappear behind the dashboard.
He thought the best option was to stop as soon as possible and pulled his Honda CRV in at Perth.
But there was no sign of her under the bonnet or elsewhere.
“I called the SSPCA but they advised me to get the help of a mechanic,” he said.
“So I drove back to South Queensferry and tried again to carry out thorough search for Martin’s snake.
“It was then that I called our local garage, Hawes.”
Mechanic Ian MacKay says he was stunned at a request to find a snake in a car in Jim’s Honda.
By chance, he had two corn snakes of his own and wasn’t fazed by the hunt.
“To be honest, I thought Jim was kidding at first,” said Ian, 40.
“We have had a few interesting customer requests over the years.
“They included unlocking a car for a tearful mum with her baby trapped in the back. But this was our first snake search…and it was to last three days.”
The illusive reptile had hidden herself in a corner behind the dashboard.
And her powers of hide and seek were proving hard to beat.
Ian left food out for her but even that failed to coax her out.
After failing to locate her, Ian called Snap-On tool hire specialist, Thomas Irvine.
He supplied a micro inspection device called a boresope … thin as a lollipop stick, with a tiny camera at the end.
It was teased and flexed into tiny crevices under the bonnet.
After three days of probing, searching and scoping the illusive Magic was found curled up in a sealed box in the car’s ventilation system.
Ian then managed to coax her out with some food.
She was cold and terrified after four nights in the car.
The hunt for Magic had seen the car’s consul, glove box, lower dashboard, instrument cluster, carpet and heater blower motor removed.
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