Though it made him sad, he let the mountain king snake go first. It was a hard one to catch — three years of hiking the mountains in the spring before he’d found one this big and this well marked. He knelt by the rocks and the snake slid off his palm and lay in the brush. Its tongue was working fast and its head was raised just a little: Hypok wondered what it must feel like to spend five years in a cage, then be suddenly released to the vast distances of nature. He watched its sides expand and retract slowly, slightly, as it breathed. The king snake lowered its shiny black head and eased into a crack in the rocks.
“See you, little king snake. Kickie some buttie.”
Hypok felt everything swell up inside him then, the sadness and the courage and the urgency and the excitement all boiling together. He waited for them to pass. That was always the way it was. Something had to give. That is nature. And nature is change. The shed had begun again and he would emerge from it soon, fresh and brilliant. Singular and unique. Composed and purposeful. Not stressed by contradiction and not paralyzed by doubt. He would be, finally, his true and actual self.
So he worked quickly, trying to take his mind off of things, trying to focus on just one feeling at a time. He got the box and carried it a few yards before he felt positive about the location. He knelt again. The two red rattlesnakes buzzed lethargically as he opened their jar and held it upright over a large flat rock. They didn’t want to come out. Hypok noted that snakes almost always want to crawl back into confined space rather than explore an open one, and he couldn’t blame them for that. The world was full of threat. He pulled them bodily from the jar and tossed them, one at a time, into the grass before they could turn and bite him. Like the mountain king, the rattlers lay in the sun for a moment, stunned by their liberty, before gliding under the big rock. Then the Russell’s vipers from Bangladesh; the horned desert vipers from Kuwait; the dwarf adder from Little Namaqualand; the rhombic night adder from Botswana; the yellow eyelash vipers from Costa Rica; the green palm viper from Honduras; the eight-foot bushmaster from Peru; and the ferde-lance from Mexico.
Hypok stood there for a moment and watched all the tails disappear beneath the rocks and brush. He loved the way snakes traveled silently and effortlessly. They were singular and self-contained. And so beautiful, too. For a moment he was happy. They were free. Then he was sad, when he thought that they would all probably die here, in habitat so different from where they had come. But who knew? They might thrive: reptiles were tough. Hypok was happy again. Then he was concerned that he was upsetting the fragile ecology of a bioregion. But he cheered up again, comparing how little a few snakes could hurt the world when mankind had fucked it up so much already. He thought: wait until the hikers and tree huggers and bird watchers and eco-weenies get a load of these things. Wake them up to the real world. He giggled and watched the huge bushmaster slide down into the brush. He felt a tear form in the corner of his right eye.
One down.
He took the next box closer to the creek. There were only four snakes in this one, but it was heavy. Out came the pale olive nine-foot king cobra from the Philippines; the two yellow gold twelve-footers from The People’s Republic of China; and the eighteen-foot dark green one from India — a serpent so big and so deadly that Hypok trembled from twenty yards away as it eased from the burlap bag, reared its head six feet into the air and stared at him, quite literally, eye to eye. Hypok stood still for a full two minutes as the snake stared him down. Finally the majestic thing lowered its shiny, blunt head and slowly nosed its way through the blooming mustard toward the creek. Hypok was smiling while the tears ran down his face.
Then the box of venomous little jewels from across the states, which he carried over the next rise and down into a green swale littered with oak stumps and wild tobacco: the Willard’s rattlers and the bright coral snakes from Arizona; the pygmy rattlers from South Carolina; the sidewinders and Mitchell’s rattlers from California; the copperheads from Florida. Hypok just opened the jars and tossed the creatures into the air, watching them land all around him. Snake rain. Serpent drops. Yes, he felt happy again.
He saved his favorite snakes for the last. He trotted back to the van and got the box. Holding it to him and making his way back through the woods with them he felt all those rampant emotions vying for attention inside himself again. The box was heavy, filled with timber rattlers from the east, his beloved Crotalus horridus horridus, and the thought of setting them free was almost too much for him. But was it too much excitement, or too much sadness, or too much anger? — he couldn’t really say. His brain buzzed and his heart felt heavy but fast and his face was sweating but cold. He told himself this liberation was necessary as a part of who he was becoming.
He’d put most of the horridus into pillowcases because they were too big for jars, all except for a couple of foot-long yearlings that had been born last summer. In a shaded oak glen not far from the creek he set down the box amid the sharp dry leaves and sighed deeply. Within the pillowcases the big horridus were moving, their heads pressed tightly into the corners — Hypok had reinforced those corners himself, by hand, with needle and thread — feeling for a way out I know how you feel, he thought: change, progress, release.
First he let go the females, four five-footers he’d had since they were hardly more than seven inches long. They buzzed vigorously as he stooped and untied the bags. Hypok then gingerly lifted the bags one at a time by a corner and poured the snakes onto the ground. He watched them coil and face him, rattles high and blurring, heads back and lowered for a strike. He just loved the spirit of the horridus.
Strangely, all four of them stopped rattling almost at once, and Hypok could hear the April breeze in the oaks and the dry chatter of the leaves moving against each other at his feet. It was a sad sound and he was smiling.
His heart jumped into the sky when he heard the voice.
“Hello, there! What are you doing?”
He reeled and dropped the two empty cases.
The park ranger was still thirty yards away, but his voice had sounded like he was almost on top of him.
Hypok felt a rapid shudder of nerves down his body and a shortness of breath. The ranger was already making his way across the swale toward him, his arms swinging with certain authority and his head — with that funny Smoky-the-Bear hat — cocked at a stern angle.
Okay, he thought.
Solid.
Capable.
Firm.
Contain yourself. You have rights.
He raised a hand in greeting and smiled.
“Just letting some snakes go, Officer! That’s all.”
Hypok looked down into his box. Two pillowcases containing the four big male horridus and the glass jar with the young ones were all that was left.
The ranger trudged toward him with his head still angled for seriousness. He wore the droop shades you’d see on television cops. He looked heavy and out of place in his stiff tan shirt with the golden badge on it, and green pants. He carried a citation book in his left hand. No gun.