"That won't do, especially when we've got a perfectly good garden full of worms."
That night, our younger daughter and I were out hunting earthworms with a flashlight. The trick, I told her, was to grab them when they had extended their front halves out of their burrows to browse on the surface. Then you shouldn't pull on them, or they would break in half. Instead, wait for them to relax and stop trying to pull back into their holes, and they would come out easily.
Priscille was not pleased with the idea of grabbing a slimy worm with her bare hands. Instead, she used paper handkerchiefs. We had caught several when a youth appeared in our driveway with a carton in his arms.
"Mr. Newbury?" he said. "I got a snake here, like you advertised for."
"Who says I advertised for a snake?" I demanded.
"Why, uh, that sign. The sign in the railroad station."
I learned that a notice had appeared on the bulletin board of the suburban station, reading: SNAKES WANTED FOR SCIENTIFIC PURPOSES. WILL PAY ONE DOLLAR FOR EACH, ANY SPECIES, followed by my name and address.
"This is a hoax," I told the youth. "I never put up such a notice, and the one snake we have is plenty."
During the next week, we were offered six garter snakes, two pine snakes, one ring-necked brown snake, and one black snake. All were declined.
I also learned that our unknown ill-wisher had planted twenty or thirty of these posters in the windows of shops in the neighborhood. I visited some of the shopkeepers, who were glad to remove the signs. I asked for descriptions of the prankster but got contradictory accounts. This led me to believe that several persons were involved. I asked the president of the local chamber of commerce to spread the word of this hoax and to watch for any more attempts.
Next, I began receiving letters reading somewhat as follows: "Dear Mr. Newbury: I have read your ad in Natural History Magazine for July, in which you say you will pay for snakes. Do you want them alive or dead, and how much are you offering? Very truly yours ..."
I called up the magazine. Yes, somebody had placed the advertisement in the classified section. They did not know who, but the check had been signed with my name and had not bounced. So for some time I was busy writing post cards, saying no snakes, thank you.
So far, this harassment had been a minor nuisance. We were sorrier for the people taken in by these hoaxes than for ourselves.
"I think," I told Denise, "that it must be the Hagnophilists. Somebody reported to them what I said in that YMHA speech about picking up a rattlesnake in my bare hands. They jumped to the conclusion that I have a morbid phobia or horror of snakes and are trying to drive me out of my gourd."
"My poor Willy! If they only knew that you were a secret snake-lover at heart!"
The campaign then took a nasty turn. A neighbor told me that, a month before, he had received an anonymous poison-pen letter, aimed at me. He had turned it in to the local police. Other neighbors had received them, too.
"For God's sake!" I said. "Why didn't you tell me about it then?"
He shuffled his feet. "I was too embarrassed. We know you and Denise are all right—best neighbors we have, in fact—and we didn't want to upset you. Anyway, we couldn't imagine that they really meant a sober, conventional person like you."
I located some of the others who had received the letters, but none had kept them. Some had given them to the police, while others had discarded them.
I went to the police station, where Sergeant Day dug the letters out of their file. They all read:
Dear Neighbor:
Recently my young son was outside watering the lawn, when a man jumped out of his car and attacked the boy. He seized the hose and began chopping it up with a hatchet, screaming "Snake! Snake! Damned snake! I'll teach you to send snakes to torment me!" He abused my son so that he came home terrified.
For obvious reasons, I wish to remain anonymous in dealing with this matter. No father wants his children frightened by insane persons like this, who is probably still in the neighborhood.
I am circulating this letter in the hope that anyone who knows of somebody who has a psychotic problem about snakes will report it to the proper authorities, so that the victim of these delusions can be treated before he harms someone. He is described as a man in his late forties, tall and powerful, with graying hair cut short, a close-cut mustache, and driving a green foreign sports car. If you know any such person, try to convince him to turn himself in to the authorities so that he can be cured of his madness.
Sargeant Day said: "We had the boys watching for this guy for weeks without results. I guess if any of 'em saw you, they just said: 'Oh, that's Mr. Newbury the banker. He couldn't be the one.' Some kook, of course."
"Anyway," I said, "the kook gave me a flattering description. Can you trace the author of this letter?"
Day shook his head. "The envelopes were postmarked from the center-city post office. If you've had any crank letters, you could compare the typing with that of this letter. It was typed on a manual typewriter with standard elite type. Notice that the capital N is battered, the lower-case a has lost its tail, and the p hits above the line. But we can't examine every typewriter in the county."
Day made me a photocopy of the letter. At home, I went through my correspondence for comparison, but no letter that I had received in the past year had been typed on the troublemaker's machine.
While all this bothered me to some extent, it drove Denise frantic. She said: "When we were married, Willy darling, you should have come to France to live instead of taking me to America. We French are more logical; we do not commit such bêtises."
The following week, the parcel service delivered a carton, securely bound with heavy staples and adhesive tape, but with several small holes punched in it. Foreseeing a struggle to get it open, Denise left that job for me when I got home. I got a screwdriver, a knife, and a pair of pliers out of the tool box, set the carton on the kitchen stepladder, and got to work. In a few minutes I lifted the top of the carton.
Up popped a mouse-colored, serpentine head, and a forked tongue flicked out at me. As I stood there stupidly, movable ribs on the sides of the neck spread themselves, disclosing a cobra's hood.
I jumped back, yelling: "Denise! Get the hell out of here!"
"Why, Willy?" came Denise's voice from the next room. "Is something the matter?"
The cobra poured out of the carton to the floor. There seemed to be no end to it. I guessed it to be at least ten feet long. (It was twelve.) It was not even the ordinary Indian cobra, but the hamadryad or king cobra, the biggest and meanest of all.
"Never mind!" I screamed. "Just run like hell! It's a cobra!"
The cobra reared up until the first yard of its length was vertical and lunged at me. Luckily, the cobra's lunge is slower than the strike of an American pit viper, such as a rattlesnake. I jumped back, so that its stroke fell short.
The snake then tried to crawl towards me, but the slick vinyl floor gave it no purchase. It thrashed from side to side, fluttering like a flag in the breeze but making only slight forward progress.
Backing away, I passed the broom closet. I opened the door in hope of finding a weapon. There were a broom and a mop, but their handles were too long for that limited space. Then I spotted the plumber's friend, with a stout thirty-inch wooden handle.
As the cobra, still skidding, inched towards me, I faced it, gripping the end with a rubber plunger. When the snake began again to rear up, I stepped forward and made a two-handed slash at its neck, like a golf stroke. The stick connected with a crack, hurling the cobra sideways.