I sat on the chaise a time or two and thought I heard a faint rustle of sorts, but I wouldn’t call it a “rattle.”
I left the mastiffs alone indoors in the middle of the day and the rattlesnake came out from the red chaise longue and got into an altercation with them. When I got back from town, the mastiffs were nursing minor snakebites, and the red rattlesnake was hiding under a shelf on the kitchen floor. I put the dogs outside and the red rattler came out from its hiding place, ready to return to its place under the red chaise longue, but I opened the side door and encouraged it to go outside where it could get under the ranch house for the winter, not under the chaise longue.
A couple of pack rats soon took over the front room too — they were able to get indoors because the pit bull needed the front door left open. The dog was a great rat killer back then and she became so excited and obsessed with reaching the rat hiding behind it that she nearly chewed off one entire corner of a big wooden bookcase. Finally to save the other bookcases and furnishings in the front room from the frenzy of the pit bull, my son Robert shot the rat with a.22 target pistol.
The pack rats nested in the big copier machine I used to print my Flood Plain Press books in the front room. They chewed off all the plastic coating on the electrical wiring. Later Charlie dismantled the dead copier and chopped it into six inch pieces for easy disposal.
The pack rats are intelligent beings and are held in great esteem by the Tohono O’Odom and other desert tribes who depended on the creatures in times of drought and famine. The people used to loot the rats’ nests for seeds and dried fruit and roots and for the baby rats as well. I once trapped a large female pack rat that had great presence as if she were the Great Mother Pack Rat. Charlie wanted to kill her but I set her free.
I carried her down the hill to release her in the hikers’ parking lot; she scampered away to a shady bush. A few moments later, as I walked back to the house, right at my gate I looked down and saw a perfect arrowhead of gray basalt, elegant and refined, made by the ancient ones. I knew it was a gift for sparing old Pack Rat’s life.
The pack rats in the attic know how to spring the traps we set for them by using scraps of wood. The sprung traps gave me an appreciation for their cleverness.
I call the big female pack rat that lives in my front yard “Ratty” after the character in The Wind in the Willows. I never bother her big rat complex in the middle of the front yard because it would disturb the rattlesnakes that live under the aloes and greasewood with Ratty.
In late August I returned from a visit to my sister in Wyoming to find the large rattlesnake that lived under the feed shed had been killed earlier that day. A roadrunner or owl tore her into three pieces, but then was interrupted and abandoned the big snake’s remains.
The big snake had lived under the shed for fifteen years or more; she did have the odd habit of climbing small bushes and trees which left her vulnerable to birds of prey. A few hours later I went out to bury her and the three pieces of her were gone, taken for a meal by some creature, maybe her killer or a passing scavenger.
I found a turquoise bead on the lawn chair in the front yard under the mesquite tree. I saw the turquoise bead as a gift, a sign of the loving presences or energies always nearby and helping me. Later I realized it came off a piece of art I had made many years before, a gourd doll with a turquoise bead around her neck which I hung in the mesquite tree. Still it was a wonderful occurrence that the single turquoise bead should fall at that time from the gourd doll onto the center of my chair.
All day and all night, a heavy silvery blue mist enveloped the jade green desert, along with a gentle hurricane rain, warm and blue through the early morning light.
CHAPTER 22
Before I walked the hills, I rode over them on horseback. In the 1960s, the National Park Service ruled the Tucson Mountain mustangs were an “alien species” and a threat to the Saguaro National Park, despite the hundreds of years the wild horses had lived here. The park rangers managed to remove the stallion and most of the mares, but a few escaped.
By 1978 when I moved here, only three wild horses remained in the Tucson Mountains. They were nearly identical bay mares with white markings that covered their faces entirely and reminded me of clouds. They followed the same trails the deer and javelina used.
By the mid-1980s, there were only two wild mares left and they were showing age. After one died the other did not last long.
The Tucson Mountains are terribly rough going for horses but manageable for mules. In 1980 my quarter horse mare fell with me on the high steep trail near the top of Wasson Peak. I jumped off her as she fell but her hind hoof (steel shod of course) clipped me in the side of the head. Her hoof smashed into my straw cowboy hat which absorbed the blow and saved me.
As it was, I lost consciousness for an instant, and my head was bleeding. When I stood up, I saw the mare had fallen and rolled twenty feet down the mountainside and lay on her side, motionless. My heart sank. We were miles from help, miles from even a jeep trail. If the mare had broken her leg, she would have to lie for hours to suffer before we’d be able to do anything for her.
But when I reached her and examined her legs, I saw that except for one deep laceration, she had no broken bones. She was just frightened by the steep terrain and precarious footing, and felt safer lying flat on the ground. I reassured her she was o.k. and encouraged her to stand up. I walked her most of the way home, and by then she had recovered nicely while I had a pounding headache; so I rode the rest of the way.
Months later I returned to the site of the accident to retrieve my hat. I ended up keeping the hat for a long time. The stiffness of the straw made the blow glance off and probably saved my life or at least my brain. The whole side of the straw hat was caved in and there were bloodstains. I should have saved it forever but I threw it away in one of my rare house-cleaning frenzies.
Years later my good Arabian gelding Hudson Bay lost his footing on the Wasson Peak trail and began to fall. I jumped clear of him and watched in horror as he tumbled end over end. But he jumped up nimble as a cat without a scratch on him.
Pansy moth
yellow and brown.
Last night you
landed on the moon
in the water.
This morning
you are floating
between the
water lily leaves.
It’s St. Patrick’s Day, 2004. The saint drove all the snakes out of Ireland; for “snakes” read “the indigenous religions of the British Isles” which held the snake to be sacred. I have ancestors among the Scots in the Leslie clan. “From the dark rock tower” is one translation I have seen for the name “Leslie.”
While I was working on my novel Gardens in the Dunes, Bettina Munch, my German translator, gave me a book about the archeology of the “Old European” period, five thousand years ago, and the Paleolithic cultures of Macedonia, Hungary and Latvia. The Old Europeans left behind a number of ceramic and other archeological artifacts with snakes as the dominant figures. The Old Europeans regarded the serpent as a sacred Earth being. There is even a horned serpent figure on a ceramic bowl. Well into the twentieth century the rural people of Eastern Europe kept black snakes under their floors because they regarded them as family guardians as well as good luck charms.