The Summer Rattly Snake

 

 

Copyright 1989 truth-or-consequences

Non-Fiction

3006 Words Exactly

Published in "The Western Horse"

I hate snakes.

And I'm ashamed to admit it.

I like to think that I am still in the process of overcoming that weakness in my character, and that some day I'll be willing to grant them the space they deserve on this earth, and that I'll maybe even love them.

I didn't say I would accomplish that in this lifetime, however.

But in my own defense I can claim to have made great strides in reducing my rather immature revulsion of the critters, and at least that's something. I used to shoot them on sight, and that was unforgivable. Now I only kill them if they are trying to bite me, and I feel justified in that. As kids we hear it ten thousand times, "Leave that snake alone. He's more afraid of you than you are of him." And that's almost always true. But I've spent a couple of lifetimes with snakes and have witnessed enough occasions wherein they are most definitely not afraid of me, that I now grant them at least respect, if not the love the Bible says we're supposed to have for all creatures great and small.

Almost every state has poisonous snakes in one region or another. And it's at this time of year in most parts of the country, (early spring), when we first remember how glad we were when they disappeared last year. At least most of us are glad. There are some bona fide snake lovers among us and we should try hard to understand their position for they may well be right. Still, it's hard to be tolerant of something that some of us are instinctively terrified of.

I remember that, as a commercial fisherman many years ago, I was terrified of sharks. I couldn't stand to touch one-- could barely stand to look at one, and we caught them accidentally all the time. They were writhing, disgusting, utterly evil creatures that should, I felt, be wiped from the earth, and if no one else would do it, then I would!

Then the fishery I was employed in was wiped out, and in order not to lose everything, I had to fish specifically for sharks. It took a few months, but I overcame my fear, much to my own surprise, and then overcame even my disgust for them. In time I learned to appreciate their beauty and I found a heartfelt fondness for them. I would have bet a million dollars it couldn't happen, yet it did happen. In years after that I found myself diving with them as an industrial diver, and on many jobs the schools of smaller sharks would be so thick that I could not see the surface, twenty or thirty feet above, and not a second passed that they were not bumping into me as they swam around in a dense school. But by then I understood them and felt quite at ease in their presence.

This leads me to believe that with regard to snakes, especially rattle snakes, which I hold in the same regard as I did sharks all those years ago, anything is possible.

We usually see the first adventuresome souls come slithering forth from their dens as early as April, depending on the region and the weather. By late May they're out in force, if they're coming out at all.

Some areas of the country may only see the occasional rattler all spring and summer. But some areas seem to be havens for them.

I recall a summer spent near Meeker, Colorado when I was a kid. I remember walking down the highway and not being able to see the white line for the squished snake skins. I remember hunting rabbits there and shooting quite a few, but never getting a one to the dinner table, because before I could get to them they were covered with rattle snakes. Rattle snakes would sometimes climb right over my shoes, racing for my downed game. I was always glad they didn't take a wrong turn and go up my pants leg.

The snakes in that area came in the house through open door or windows, up through the drain in the bathtub, or onto the porch while the girls were trying to sunbathe, and would steal hamburgers off your plate during barbecues. It seemed like everyone knew someone who had been bitten, and dogs were always running around the place with swollen snouts or fat legs from getting struck. We hit a dozen with the lawnmower every time we did the lawn, and at certain times of the day the buzzing from bushes along the trail as we walked was virtually constant.

And I remember the time the toilet overflowed. We thought that was odd because we had recently cleaned the cess-pool. But while my uncle plunged away to clear the clog, the bowl suddenly overflowed again, erupting with a thousand rattle snake babies. They spilled out onto the bathroom floor and went wriggling and squirming this way and that all through the house and we kids ran and screamed like it was the end of the world. I only spent the one summer there, and I hope that was an unusual year, for I could not imagine spending my life like that.

An area of western Nevada saw a bumper crop one year, too. I was working on horseback, riding about 140 miles a week, and the squirming, pesky little things were absolutely everywhere. In my naiveté I declared war on them. I killed an average of ten a day for that whole summer, and the sheer cost of ammunition, once I added it up at the end of the season, revealed my foolishness, for I did not appreciably reduce the snake population--nature took care of that the following year. And all I had to show for my efforts was a sore hand from all the gunfire, a thinner pocketbook from buying all those bullets, and a reputation as a snake killer extraordinaire-- something I came to regret in later years of enlightenment. I sacrificed the souls of a thousand snakes for the sake of one hard learned lesson, and that was: "If I can't coexist peaceably with snakes, I shouldn't ride where they live. They didn't invite me."

I still reserve the right, however, to send a particularly belligerent or trouble making snake to snake heaven. It's been claimed that those types of snakes are disappearing from the earth, and the genes that are surviving are from the snakes who keep their mouths shut and their rattles silent as folks ride by on the trail. Those who buzz or strike get killed and that's the end of that family tree.

Rattlesnakes are still a danger to some degree, as are Grizzly bears in Alaska or Great White sharks on the Barrier Reef. But we wouldn't think of wiping out bears as a species, and folks are finally beginning to understand the Great White, and to be willing to allow him his space on the planet. We should not be so quick to want to wipe out the rattlesnake either.

Still, it helps to know a bit about the behavior of the snake in the wild, and it's not always as the books, encyclopedias and snake lovers would have us think.

Of the roughly seven or eight hundred rattlesnakes I killed that one summer alone, about six were legitimate threats.

One incident involved the biting of my horse, Clyde, on my way to work one morning just after daybreak. I was galloping along a familiar trail halfway to the ranch where I worked. It was early and cold with dew on the cactus and the last thing I was thinking of was snakes as I loped along half asleep. But just as Clyde left the ground in mid stride I saw it-- a big, fat, nasty brute laying in a figure eight in the center of the trail.

I yelled out of reflex but even if Clyde had understood me there was nothing he could do. As his front end was coming down to contact the ground the snake shot straight up into the air. Clyde never even saw it. It seemed to twist in the air and as Clyde touched the ground its open mouth hit him squarely on the right front breast. Two inches to the right and it would have caught me just below the kneecap.

I reined up and turned in the saddle to see the snake tumbling across the trail as Clyde's hind feet had hit him.

I stopped and promptly dispatched the snake as it leaped and struck at me, and then I went to work on Clyde's bite. The fang marks were clear. I used my little suction type snake bite kit on the wound, but no venom came out. I was concerned at first that the device wasn't working, but the bite never swelled or caused a problem, and so I was to conclude that it had been a dry bite. Perhaps the snake hadn't had time to inject any venom as Clyde loped past. That snake hadn't even bothered to rattle.

Another time, three of us rode up a blind canyon that had steep walls on both sides and a trail so narrow in the bottom that a horse couldn't turn around. As the first horse passed I saw the snake dart from his hole, about twenty feet up on the left hand bank. He stuck his reptilian head up and looked back and forth as his little forked tongue slipped nervously in and out, seemingly trying to figure out what the commotion was. As the second horse passed he was already on his way down the hill. And as I brought up the rear the snake, obviously in a hurry, tumbled out upon the trail twenty feet behind me.

I kept walking and watching this curious critter, and I saw him stick his head in the air and look back and forth again, up and down the trail, as if trying to sense for sure which way we'd gone. Then, apparently sensing our heat, he took aim at us and began wriggling up the trail toward us, as fast as his little snake legs could carry him.

I told the others ahead of me to get a move on as we had company. They trotted out and so did I-- but the snake kept coming. We arrived at our destination, an abandon mine shaft about a hundred and fifty yards up the trail, and as we dismounted I saw the snake still coming right for us. He worked up the last little hill to where we'd dismounted and continued to make a beeline for where we stood. That was enough and we sent him to the great hunting grounds in the sky and felt no remorse about it.

I remember swimming the Carson River that same year during a flood. I looked to the right and not three feet away swam a medium sized rattler, making his own little wake in the smooth wake left by my horse. He made no move to come at me-- I suppose he was just intent on getting across that river. We got to the bank and went our separate ways, and that was that.

And I recall the time that ten of us went out for a ride and cut off the trail to take a short cut. We stopped amongst some sage to wait for stragglers, and there was the telltale buzz, right beneath a skittish Arabian with a beginner rider. The girl didn't hear the snake or didn't recognize the sound, and I didn't want to tell her about it. I asked her, simply, if she would move her horse. But she wanted to argue and to know why I wanted her to move her horse, and by this time the big bruiser had coiled and looked as though he was trying to select a leg to bite. About that time there was another buzz from the horse's front feet. Then another snake came from a few feet behind the horse, slithered directly between the horse's hind feet, going over the top of the snake that was already there, and took up a position just behind the front feet!

Just as the girl finally decided to go ahead and move the horse, I was no longer sure it should be moved--

The Arab scooted his behind a yard to one side, managing, miraculously, not to step on any of the snakes, and you guessed it--two more buzzers went off from a bush by the new position of his back feet.

As more of the horses who were waiting began to shuffle around, more buzzers went off all around us. I suppose there were twenty or thirty rattlesnakes in that small patch of desert, all intertwined around the feet of our horses, and maybe more that hadn't buzzed-- It was a veritable convention.

I frankly saw no way out of the predicament. If the horses exploded into a bucking frenzy and even half of us got dumped, there's no telling what the outcome might have been. It's at times like this you plan on riding your best no matter what. It's at times like this that rodeo scores should be recorded.

One by one we gently moved the horses this way or that, trying to keep them from being struck. None of the broncs even seemed to care about the snakes. Perhaps that was some bit of divine intervention. But if even one got hit and panicked, it would have set the others off, which would have certainly gotten them bitten as well.

After a few minutes we extricated all the horses from that amazing predicament without the slightest mishap. --Except that when we were safely out of the area one of the hands explained to the girl on the skittish Arab what the danger had been, and she fainted, fell off the horse, and hit her head on a dirt clod. Other than that we came out unscathed.

Then there was the time four of us rode single file up a narrow trail cut into the side of a sheer rock cliff. Again I brought up the rear and was quite shocked to see a small, stick-like thing fly right off the side of the rock wall about eye level. The rider ahead of me saw it too, out of the corner of his eye, and as he turned his head to look it flew right behind his ear and clean over his horse. The little bugger had put a lot of energy into that jump, and it was ultimately his death leap as he missed the man, the horse and the trail and plunged clear over the cliff. We're not sure what his motivation was. A split second sooner in timing and he would have caught the rider square on the left cheek. Was that his intention? We'll never know.

And then there was the time---

Well we don't want to scare every single horseman off the range this summer. But snakes are a thing to be kept in the back of the mind. The odds of a fatality or even serious injury or sickness to an adult human as a result of being bitten are almost incalculably small. And the odds of losing a horse to snake bite are about five hundred times less. In preparing for this article I was unable to find one vet who, in his or her entire career, could recall one case of fatal snakebite in horses, although it has probably happened at some time in the history of the world. A foal would be most susceptible.

A secondary problem related to the bite of a horse is to be of the most concern, namely a swelling shut of the nasal passages, as many bites will occur on the snout as the foolish horse bends down to investigate the snake. In that case, the object is to keep the nasal passages open with garden hose or some suitable tubing (almost anything will work) until the swelling goes down. It would be a shame to have the horse survive the snake bite but die of suffocation.

Bites on the legs of horses can usually be treated as simple injuries, though it can be important not to work the horse after a bite so as to not speed the circulation of the poison through the system too rapidly. If left alone and treated perhaps with alternating hot and cold packs, the vast majority of snake bites to horses will be self limiting and relatively minor afflictions. Exercise may be appropriate in later stages if edema sets in.

People do get bit from time to time, but the bites are seldom serious. I have a hat full of hair raising snake stories I could tell, guaranteed to make the skin crawl and the heart beat faster, the fingernails dig harder into the saddle horn and the toes curl until they cramp-- But for the squeamish among us I'll cease and desist. Remember that it's nearly impossible for a snake to bite a human while that person is riding a horse. High boots and chaps will minimize the already small danger. And if you do get bit, just relax. It's possible it's a dry bite anyway.

It must be born in mind that about three quarters of all bites from all snakes in all states are a result of the male of the human species trying to be cool and machismo (playing catch with rattlers or putting them in sleeping bags of "friends"). As one expert remarked, "That can't genuinely be listed as a snake bite wound, can it? Shouldn't it more appropriately be classed, for the records, "Testosterone poisoning?"

Yes, I think it should.

 

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