The kids and I were deep in the forest when the words no father wants to hear reached my ears.

And it wasn’t: “Dad, I need to do a poo.”

It was even worse than that.

They came from the seven-year-old – quite calmly, considering the horror the subject matter evoked in me.

“Dad. A snake,” he said, in the same manner he might have said, “Dad, a shoe, or Dad, a Chupa Chup wrapper”, had it been either of those, which fortunately for the environment, but not my blood pressure, it wasn’t.

It’s interesting what children are calm about and what they are not.

For example, our son is not the least bit calm about the notion of the Wolfman. He would have been far more nervous about the Wolfman appearing in the woods than any reptile.

The same thing goes for the Joker from Batman and, no thanks to me, the Fogman.

My wife is not happy with me for putting Fogman into the boy’s head. Combined with thoughts of the Wolfman and the Joker swirling around on those random nights when imagination takes hold, Fogman makes for some frantic navigation by my son from one light switch to the next on his way to bed.

The Fogman, legend has it, inhabits the Buderim fog, slipping in and out of the swirling mist with hunched shoulders and a limp.

“Stop it Dad,’’ he laughs as I mimic the creature’s stumbling gate down the hall towards him, bumping off the walls.

I can’t help myself. Sometimes I grab the Sunshine Coast Daily and pretend to read the weather report.

“Mmmm. Interesting,’’ I say. “There’s a medium to quite medium chance of mild fog tonight.’’

“Daaaaaaaad!” he groans.

I can’t help myself.

My father used to perform similar nonsense when we were kids.

I remember tossing restlessly in my bed with his tales of the Beast with Five Fingers and The Bird with the Dripping Wing haunting my head.

The Beast was essentially a severed arm that crawled along on its own accord. Sometimes I was convinced I could hear it coming down our crusher-dust driveway in the stillness of the night.

The other one was a mysterious seabird, which flew silently through the darkness leaving trails of blood in the streets of cobblestone villages, courtesy of a wounded wing.

The sound of a dripping tap, or a flapping noise such as the fruit bats getting stuck into Mr and Mrs Ray’s pawpaws next door, could take on a horrifying new dimension.

The probability the stories were fiction provided only a thin barrier of resistance to the idea of imaginary creatures coming to get me in the night. I trained the machine guns of the Fairy Swordfish model airplane suspended from my roof and at the window to bolster reinforcements.

Anyway, it’s time to get this column back on track, specifically the track winding its way down to the creek at Buderim Forest Park, where we were on our way to see what the waterfalls would be like after the big rain.

That’s where Hank saw the snake, which – despite it being real, and potentially capable of biting us, for all we knew – did not evoke any visible signs of fear in him.

He reminded me of the Steve Irwin and Wiggles DVD he loved when he was younger. There was a song about what do when you see a snake.

It went, stand back and let it slither on by – or something like that – I couldn’t really hear him because of the overriding sound of my own heart beating.

We didn’t have exposure to such intelligent environmental lessons when I was his age. If a snake was encountered, we had been taught to go and get an adult, who would then attempt to cut its head off with a shovel.

The adult would usually be too terrified to get close enough for an effective strike and the snake would inevitably win out, slithering to freedom in the long grass of the vacant block next door – where any cricket ball hit there for the next six weeks would go un-foxed, even if it was a gleaming new six-stitcher.

I took the kid’s advice – we all stood back and watched the whip-like green and yellow serpent glide across the leafy path about two metres ahead and disappear into the forest foliage like an image from one of those magic 3D posters fading from view.

That night over dinner we talked about the roaring stream and the tumbling waterfalls.

There was a rustling in the bushes outside. We all looked up, wide-eyed, from our sausages and veggies.

“Could be a snake,” said Hank.

He really shouldn’t joke about things like that.