I told the dogs to leave the snake alone, and they did; the snake stopped rattling as soon as the dogs backed off. The snake didn’t rattle at me, most snakes here don’t rattle at me, only at the dogs.
The snake hunkered back down in his bowl and went back to his hunt for small creatures that might yet come to the water tub; he didn’t have a lot of time left before he lost the shade and had to retreat from the sun. Later I saw some dove feathers scattered near the pottery bowl so I think he got a meal out of his strategy.
The following morning I had a close encounter at six a.m. before the sun was quite over the mountain. I hadn’t had my morning coffee when I went out to water my pots of ruellia and fig and lemon trees. I leaned down face first to turn the water valve to the hose, and it was only as I raised back up that I noticed the small snake sitting under the big night-blooming cactus. He was calm despite my being only twelve inches away from him.
Yesterday morning I saw the rust brown rattlesnake from a distance across the yard. The big snake had compacted itself against the rain-spout to be less visible to the doves that come for water, and to avoid confrontations with dogs.
Once my pit bull tried to bite the brown rattler but the snake bit her first and got the dog by the nose and hung on; the dog shook her head and the snake let go and landed about ten feet away. Snakes are relatively delicate creatures but fortunately this was a big snake that was able to survive being thrown.
There are two nearly identical brown rattlers in back so I can’t tell if this is the big brown snake from under the tool shed or the big snake that lives under the old timbers by the pool. Yes, this is why scientists torment snakes with tiny implanted radio transmitters — to identify them. Me? I prefer to muddle along with uncertainty and leave the creatures in peace. The transmitter microwaves interfere with the normal life of the snakes so the information gathered is flawed anyway.
The rattlesnakes that live under the house by the fireplace keep warm all winter so they don’t hibernate. They smell the mild winter rain as it falls and have enough body warmth to come out and sit by the west door. The three of them sit in loose coils side by side, nearly touching; as the rain falls on their backs they gracefully sip the raindrops from their scales. One of them tipped its head delicately to one side so the raindrops rolled into its mouth.
I thought I was the only one with rattlesnakes in and under her house, but I was mistaken. My friends Vernon and Becky from Hopi came to a Water Blessing gathering in Tucson. Before the meeting I was talking with them in the hotel lobby and the subject of rattlesnakes in the house came up.
Becky said a rattlesnake lived in their house; it would hide in a pipe in the kitchen wall when it saw her. Vernon was surprised to hear this, and Becky said she didn’t tell him because she only saw it twice. Most older houses have ways for the snakes to get in, usually holes made by small rodents and pack rats. I didn’t get to hear how it got out but probably it used the same hole as it entered. Snakes don’t get lost because they can follow their own scent trail and backtrack. The snake probably left after it had consumed all the small rodents in the house.
Vernon said the Hopi farmers copied the tight coil of the rattlers to make their garden plots. The farmers made deep circular depressions in the garden soil that were designed to catch and hold rainwater for the seeds planted in the center just the way the rattlers caught rain in their coils.
The followers of José Díaz Bolio and the cult of Ahau Kan in the Yucatán believe we live in a “Crotalus-centric” Universe in which Rattlesnake taught the Mayans architecture and how to build the great pyramids based upon the rattlesnake’s coil.
CHAPTER 19
On the night before the seventeenth of September 2002 a cold wind blew out of the northwest. The next morning the dogs in back, Banana and Dolly, were barking madly because their yard had a rattler in it but it was a snake that came to hibernate, not one of the regular snakes from around the house. The snake was unfamiliar with the yard as it searched for the opening to the snake den under the house.
At hibernation time I see rattlesnakes I’ve never seen before: the reddish diamondback, the light masked snake, the dark masked snake, the albinistic snake, one by one they come to the entrance to the big snake den under my front yard. These are the snakes that spend the summer farther away from the house and aviaries, away from people, and return only in the late fall. The big reddish diamondback was pinned down by the dogs in the yard, so I brought the dogs indoors for ten minutes or so to allow the snake to get away.
The change in weather brought another snake after that one. The dogs barked with great agitation. I called them off and heard rattling from the direction of their dog house, and when I looked I saw a small light masked snake in the door of the dog house. The snake seemed to be exiting, and the odd thing was that just as I made eye contact with the snake, it immediately rushed toward me as if I reminded it of the garden area it intended to reach for safety. But no sooner than one snake was safe, I heard the dogs bark and another snake was trying to cross their area to reach the entrance to the snake den.
It’s three days later and the red diamondback is caught between the parrot wire and the hardware cloth because it has a meal in a lump in its belly it needs to digest. The sun is on the snake so I hurried the dogs out of the way and went for the wire cutters. When I returned the snake had already escaped and its tail end was disappearing into its hole under the macaw aviary. The snake never rattled at me once the whole time it was trapped.
Mid-October now, and at night the temperature drops below seventy-five degrees. In the morning I find deep imprints of circles in the soft dirt, circles as precise as any circle drawn with a compass. The circles are so perfect one cannot help but notice them. Perfect circles in the dirt are usually man-made — the imprints of big round man-made objects — garden pots or spare tires.
I looked more closely and realized the deep imprint was left by a rattlesnake that nestled itself down a half inch in the dirt for warmth last night while it waited for a rodent to pass. I didn’t see deep imprints earlier in the year while nights were in the nineties. The snakes left only faint imprints of themselves in the dust.
The circles are identical and I imagine the same snake made them each time he moved; he made another circle imprint when he coiled. Three of the five imprints were directly over small holes as if the snake blocked off one rodent hole to force the rodents to use the hole most convenient for the snake to strike.
It was my friend the writer Linda Niemann who discovered the cult of Ahau Kan inherited by the poet José Díaz Bolio. He wrote a book titled The Geometry of the Maya and Their Rattlesnake Art, in which he laid out evidence for an ancient belief system in which the rattlesnake Ahau Kan was the central figure. The Costa Rican rattlesnake Crotalus durissus durissus was the key figure. The poet claimed that the rattlesnakes taught human beings what Díaz Bolio termed “a Crotalus-centric” geometry and architecture in which the perfect circle was seen in the Moon and the Sun, and in the imprint of the rattlesnake in sand.
The Maya design of pyramids, each level resting on the previous in a concentric stacked pyramid form, was nearly identical to the morphology of the rattlesnake in its coil. That concentric pyramid form in stone, while very massive, also meant the pyramid did not easily fall down in an earthquake.