Search the Internet under the subject “rattlesnake” and you’ll find the same proportion of snake-killers and snake-haters as there are snake-lovers and snake-appreciators. I downloaded the photographs of dozens of rattlesnakes stretched out and piled up on top of one another to cool off in the concrete culverts under the highway near Bakersfield, California. I was heartened to see so many big rattlesnakes together.
I was telling rattlesnake stories at a Lannan Foundation dinner one evening in Santa Fe. I talked about the people I knew who’ve stepped on or even sat on rattlesnakes without being bitten. My uncle Wafer, Dick Chapman, myself — we had all stepped on rattlesnakes without incident. One cold day when Linda Niemann was a brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad, she sat on a small rattler that was trying to warm itself on a rock, and it didn’t bite.
J.E. who worked for the Lannan Foundation was seated at our table and said she had a rattlesnake story. It happened when she was nineteen and had just arrived in Tucson from Connecticut for her freshman year at the University of Arizona. She had no experience in the desert or in the West. A week after her arrival, she was invited to a big beer bust at a campground on the road to the Catalina Mountains. After dark the party-goers built a bonfire and everyone was having a jolly, noisy time. She had to urinate so she went a distance from the bonfire in the dark. She pulled down her jeans and panties and as she squatted her right heel came down on a big rattlesnake.
The snake buried its fangs deep into her heel. With her panties and jeans still down around her ankles, she ran back to the bonfire screaming for help with the big rattlesnake hanging onto her heel. No one saw whether she wore panties or pants — all eyes were on the snake as the people around the bonfire ran over one another in their haste to escape.
Fortunately someone had invited a cowboy from a ranch nearby to attend the beer bust. The cowboy wasn’t afraid to help J.E. He told her to stand still while he went back to his truck. He returned with a shotgun and she said she thought “Oh no! — I’ve been bitten by a snake and now I’m about to get shot.”
The cowboy thought the better of it and took the shotgun back to his truck. This time he brought back a hatchet. He chopped the snake’s head from the body but the head would not come loose from her heel, and the cowboy had to chop the snake’s jaws with the hatchet to get it off her heel.
Next the cowboy called out for whiskey and took two or three big swallows “for protection” while he sucked the venom from the wound. J.E. believes the cowboy saved her life that night because it took the ambulance more than an hour to arrive. As it was she spent a week in the hospital but sustained no permanent damage.
All the people and noise must have frightened the rattlesnake a great deal before J.E. came along, which may account for the severity of the bite.
If you go to a place where the rattlesnakes don’t know you or places where humans attack snakes, then you must be much more careful. It is wise to cultivate a certain self-discipline that requires you to look before you step or reach. For me watering in the garden is the time I have to be cautious because the spray from the hose may cause a snake to move silently from a shady place behind a flowerpot behind me and if I step back without first looking, I might step on a snake.
The angle of the sun about a week before the first day of spring is their signal. The rattlesnakes begin to emerge. The big orange snake suns herself by the west door on a heap of cut flower debris; she only rattled the first day when she and I startled one another. When the pup sniffed the big rattler it allowed the puppy’s nose to touch it without incident.
Later, on the west side of the house I looked out the window and saw two rattlesnakes dancing in a heap of stove ashes.
The big albino rattler under the fig tree is the same color as the limestone around the base of the clay pot. This year he got angry at the dogs on the other side of the fence because they kept barking and spoiled his hunting. Now he’s sprawled under the fig tree with a big lump of dinner distending his belly, too full to be comfortable but also too full to flee. He’s back in a day or two to sit next to the pale limestone under the fig tree to watch the drainpipe where rats keep their nurseries.
Later we found a yearling diamondback in the pigeon cage. He wasn’t after pigeons because they are too big for him to swallow. So he tolerated many pigeons stepping all around him without striking one. He was waiting for a sparrow or small rodent to come inside the cage to pilfer feed.
Charlie herded him out of the cage and the snake hasn’t been back. Was he the one who tried and failed to swallow pigeons last summer?
The snake by the fig tree is the same one that turns itself almost white when it sits in the sand outside the military macaw cage on the white sand. He shares that area with a small snake with a black mask.
I once touched the dark masked snake when I was weeding my wild asters after sundown. I felt the snake shudder at my touch and draw away, but the snake didn’t rattle. The snake had every right to bite me when I touched him but he sensed I meant no harm. I don’t weed after dark anymore, and the snake didn’t sit under the wild asters again.
The big snake that lives under the feed shed is a Western diamondback of medium to dark brown, and no mask. She’s the one that ate so much she couldn’t fit the lump in her belly under the shed and had to lie there for a few hours until her meal digested a bit. At first glance I feared she might be dead until I gently touched her tail and she stuck her head out from under the shed to see what I was up to. Lately she sits by the rainwater outlet into the pool. She shares that spot with one or two other smaller snakes that look just like her. She has a sister as big as she who sits out by the small watering hole.
The fourth morning after July 11, 2001 when my mother died, I took my horse for a ride. I left the house before dawn to get saddled and ready for daybreak. The Catalina Mountains were heaped with blue rain clouds so the light of the rising sun was diffuse and luminous — a silver blue shimmered in the jade green of the jojoba and palo verde, and greasewood.
The horse took his time and picked his way through the rocks on the trail; when he stopped I thought he was malingering until I heard a faint rattle and saw a rattlesnake on the trail, motionless, half coiled and poised for full retreat. In the early morning light the snake was an amazing ethereal pale blue — rain cloud blue.
The horse walked another fifty feet and stopped again; there in the middle of the trail sat another pale blue rattler in a flat hunter’s coil. The horse stopped soon enough so the snake did not rattle.
As a child I’d seen a grass green rattler and a rattler as black as local basalt, but I never expected a blue rattlesnake. The snake’s scales are actually tiny hard feathers with a prismatic inner structure in which the color of a feather comes not from pigment but from light. Like the opal with shifting patterns of refraction that allow different hues of light to pass through, the snake’s scales soak up the color of the surrounding light making them invisible to the human eye for minutes at a time.
Twin blue rattlesnakes — I thought of my mother at once — that’s where she was now — her human form and energy changed and joined with the silver blue light of the morning. The twin rattlesnakes caught my attention; they were her message to me. Where she was now was in this world and nearby me, but not as she was.
On the seventh night after my mother’s burial, the dog in the front room barked nonstop until we went out to see. The door outside was open so the dog could go out whenever she wished. I didn’t turn on the light in the room because Charlie had the flashlight. He walked through the dark room and outdoors but as I followed I heard a snake rattle in the room with me.