What lurks in yonder ivy?

My friend, Mark, lives in a small cottage surrounded by ancient milkwoods, which provide shelter from the winds and refuge for francolins and guineafowl from night time predation by wild cats which live on the mountains above us. He has no walls or fences around the property and snakes pass through from time to time. One hot summer's day, he noticed a movement near his garage, which is covered by decades-old ivy that extends about 40cm from the wall. He went outside to look and saw a large puffadder making its way up into the ivy, no doubt to find a nice spot for a snooze! Being the man he is, he just shrugged and left it to coexist in his space.

It was years before he told me about it, and at least once a week I would duck under the ivy to get past the car when I went there for tea and a chat about what fish he had been catching and what the latest skinder (gossip) was on the ledge down at Rooikrantz in Cape Point Nature Reserve where die-hard fishermen went to catch yellowtail. I'm sure I would have steered clear if I'd known about the puffadder sooner, but so long had passed since he saw it go up the ivy that I figured it would be long gone.

Last week, he needed to fix a few leaks in the garage roof and sent the gardener up the ladder to do so. The gardener needed to cut back a little of the ivy to access the sheeting, and the leaks were duly plugged. A couple of days later, a fierce southeaster blew across the Peninsula, wreaking havoc in the gardens, and apparently a crucial anchor point in the ivy had been severed, as the entire creeper peeled away from the wall and fell to the ground, looking for all the world like a rolled up carpet, so tightly interwoven were the stalks!

A long-hidden window saw the light of day, and fortunately no snakes were found on the scene of the horticultural disaster. But it took the gardener a whole day to chop it into neat squares and two trips to the dump to dispose of it!