Rattlesnakes I Have Known

     The Ford pickup rolled ever so slowly across the flat farmyard.  Dad tried to stop the forward roll of the ’50 Ford pickup by pressing his hands on the driver-side door and pushing rearward, his legs angled toward the front of the pickup, his upper body slanted toward the pickup’s rear, every muscle straining.

     He had come rolling into the yard, stopped abruptly and jumped out in a hurry.  The door slammed.  The pickup either never came to a complete stop, or it started rolling forward on the gentle incline that was our farmyard.  Dad apparently forgot to leave the thing in gear.  He didn’t want to take the time to open the door, jump in and engage the transmission.  He was in a hurry.  It is an indelible picture in my mind.

    I was riding my tricycle in the yard.  I didn’t see the snake.  I was pretty close to it, too.

    The other mental image of that day is Dad again, this time with some kind of flexible metal tube raised in an arc over his head, about to come down on the rattlesnake.  The tube was a piece of exhaust pipe for a Maytag gas-powered washing machine.  He killed the snake by whacking it with the flexible exhaust pipe.

     The earliest washing machine in my memory was a white with red trim ringer machine powered by electricity.  The exhaust pipe must have been in the dead-metal pile near the shop.  It must have been the nearest thing for Dad to grab.  There would have been shovels and bars in the shop, or a gun or two on the back porch.  He must have been in a hurry.

     I don’t remember being removed from the scene, but I bet I was, before anything else happened.  I don’t have a clear picture of the snake or the disposal of its dead carcass.  From that time on, I have had a fear of snakes that I have never completely conquered.  It was my first experience with a rattlesnake.

     Most of my rattlesnake experiences happened in Kansas, in my front yard.   November of 2007, I came home from a day of helping a contractor tear off and replace shingles.  There he was, a rattlesnake stretched out in the driveway tracks.  Jesse the dog was visiting.  She spent the day in the pickup while I was on the roof.  She got a little more pickup time while I went into the house and grabbed the shotgun.  I let Jesse out after I had the snake safely interred.

    Sometime early in the 21^st century, the Goodwife and I were coming home in the old Buick we had bought from the church.  This snake was lying on the west edge of the driveway, about 30 yards south of the garage.   The Goodwife was driving.  She stopped and backed up.  I tried to convince her that I should get out and make sure it was a rattler.  But no, back and forth we went five or six times over the hapless critter.

     Finally, I said, “Do you think you killed it?”  Turned out not to be as facetious as I intended it.  I waited till we were safely garaged before I got out of the car.  I walked back to where the mangled snake lay. The rattle portion was pretty badly damaged.

    I put in a call to Brett.  He was one time a custodian at school.  He was also a taxidermist who made some spending money with his hobby.  His specialty was lifelike rattlesnakes coiled and ready to strike on pieces of weathered lumber.  He once brought a trailer out to the farm to take a load of weathered boards left over from the destruction of the old tin barn that went down to make room for the current red barn.  He also used some of the wood to make rustic picture frames.

     Brett decided it might be worth his time to take a look at the mangled snake.  I warned him that the rattles were damaged, but he said that was okay, he had lots of rattles.  He showed up about an hour after the execution.  I followed him out to the site.  He picked up a good size rock from the road and tossed it at the snake.  Never assume it’s dead, he warned.

     Sure enough, the rock landed by the snake, and faster than you can blink an eye, that snake did a 180, the head facing north as it lay “dead”, now facing south, and us.  We both backed up, but the snake held his position.

     I brought a gallon ice cream container, the closest thing I could come up with for the bucket Brett requested.  He got a stick about a yard long and very carefully ran it under the snake’s midsection.  Carefully he lifted the snake.  It held the same posture as it had on the ground.  I thought it might hank limply over the stick like a rope, but it came up still stretched out.

    Carefully, Brett let the snake tail first down into the pale.  He worked the upper body and head down until the snake was all curled up in the bucket.  Then very, very carefully, with his hands at about four and eight o’clock on the ice cream lid, he started it up from the ground beside the bucket, worked it slowly over the top of the bucket, keeping his hands out of the way as much as possible.  He got the lid on and snapped it firmly in place.

     “Now what, Brett?” I asked.  How you gonna get him out of there?”

     “I’ll put him in the freezer for four or five days.  Then he’ll be safe to handle.”  Brett said he could get up to $375 for a mounted rattler if he left it on display in the local gun shop during pheasant season.  

     One rattlesnake I almost thought was pretty.  Brett had begun working for K-Dot, the state highway folks and was out of town.  It was summer and I was in a hurry to get back to the farm.  I needed some kind of lumber for a project at the farm, and I knew right where to get the lumber.  It was under the overhang on the west side of the house. 

      I walked along the south side where the deck is now.  As I crossed the west sidewalk, I came to a sudden halt and slowly backed up.  About two paces in front of me, stretched out in the grass, was the rattler.  It was a hot summer day, but I was chilled.  As I sighted the rattler’s head over the bead on the 12 gauge, I saw that he really had a pretty pattern and a slightly different color than most of his breed.  Too bad Brett was out of town.

     I went about my business of getting lumber from the pile beneath the overhang, but I found it very difficult to back up.  I had to be eyeing where I stepped all the time.  In the back of my mind was the story in Huckleberry Finn where Huck coils the dead snake near Jim’s bedroll for a joke.  The dead snake’s mate came along and waited patiently by the corpse all day and bit poor old Jim when he went to crawl into bed.  A snake as pretty as the one I had just dispatched had to have a mate somewhere near.  (It never showed up, that I know of.)

      The case of the woodpile rattlesnake had a sort of gallows humor to it.  It was spring and I was cleaning up around the yard.  I was carrying remnants from the near the garage where I had used the table saw, across the driveway to the woodpile.  A bunny, one of a ubiquitous supply, lay twitching in the grass near the woodpile. 

    I didn’t think too much of the sight because of experiences I had a few times during the winter.  The first time I saw the “dead” adult bunny, I dug a hole in the road ditch near the driveway.  When I went with the shovel to pick up the “dead” bunny stretched out in the yard, he jumped up and took off running.

     The Goodwife didn’t entirely believe my story of an epileptic bunny, so after one or two more seizures, the bunny had one just outside in front of a west window.  I went inside and took the Goodwife to the window.  We watched for maybe five minutes.  The bunny sat up, shook his head a few times, and finally loped off.  My story was suitably corroborated.

     So when I saw the young bunny twitching in the grass by the woodpile, I just said to myself, “Hmm, epilepsy handed down to the next generation.  Another epileptic bunny.”  I turned with my armload of wood scraps to the pile I had been visiting all morning.  I stopped in midstep with the sudden hissing and rattling coming from near the pile.

      This one was a young snake, not very long, but apparently hungry, judging from the size of meal he had chosen, and apparently suitably poisonous.  He crawled under the woodpile where he could watch me.  I was afraid to take my eye off him because if he disappeared, I’d never be able to pick firewood off the pile without a ten foot pole.   I hollered until the Goodwife came to see what was the ruckus.  By the time she arrived on scene, the little bunny had ceased twitching.

     She returned with shotgun and shell, and I dispatched the snake under the woodpile.  This time, neither bunny nor headless snake took off when I approached with the shovel to bear them to their grave.

     The most exciting rattlesnake story was also our first rattlesnake adventure at our rural Kansas home.  One of the advantages of moving out of town was the girls could have dogs.  I wouldn’t let them have a dog in town.  It wasn’t fair to have a dog penned up in a yard or dog run.  So we had two dogs who roamed free of fence or leash.

     It was fall, we had returned from Colorado to start the new school year, and I had plenty of yard work to catch up on after a summer of neglect.  One afternoon after school, I was running the lawn mower on the north side of the house.  The Goodwife came running around the east side of the house, obviously in great distress, yelling something I couldn’t hear over the roar of the lawn mower.

     When I shut the mower off, she informed me there was a rattlesnake in the front yard.  Then I could hear the dogs barking.  I came around the house to see a good sized rattlesnake coiled under the bush near the sidewalk in the front yard.  He was rattling furiously, his head swiveling back and forth to keep an eye on all the potentially harmful creatures in his vicinity.

     Licorice, the little black dog, was nervously running back and forth near the garage, a good, safe thirty feet away from the snake.  His bark had reached hysterical pitch.  The girls stood on the porch watching.  Iko, the hyper lab mix, was very uncharacteristically sitting on her haunches in the shadow of the house, watching the snake, barking occasionally.  She looked like a sunflower plucked from the earth about an hour ago and left in the sun.  Her leaves were all wilted and her usual vibrant joy of life had left her.

     Iko had “killed” a huge bull snake a few days earlier in the right-of-way that runs east of the yard and allows access to the pasture and the many utilities therein.  Apparently, the bull snake had grown accustomed to our traffic pattern of coming up the driveway and turning into the garage.  When a pickup towing a trailer full of horses came up the drive and didn’t turn into our garage, it ran its four axles over the snake stretched across the roadway.  Iko found the wounded snake and finished it off.  The rattlesnake had proved to be a more vigorous opponent. 

      I thought briefly of shovel or hoe.  Then I thought of the shotgun leaning in the corner of my closet, the box of shells on the floor near the butt.  That would be easier on both the snake and me.

     Having fetched the shotgun and shells, the Goodwife joined the gallery on the porch.  I circled around the snake, finding a path that would allow me to hit the snake and not the bush, nor spectators, nor any cattle in the nearby pasture.

     The shotgun blast provided the exclamation point to the uproar.  The headless snake went limp, its rattling ceased.  The dogs stopped barking.  A moment of silence ensued. 

      The danger of the snake over, its poisonous head blown into oblivion, our attention turned to Iko.  She was bleeding from the tongue

     The Goodwife put in a call to the local vet.  In his usual laconic style, the vet bluntly stated that if Iko was a big dog, she would survive, a little one, she would die.  Bleeding from the tongue didn’t mean she got bitten on the tongue.  The poison breaks down the capillary walls.  A bite anywhere on the muzzle would cause the tongue and nose to bleed because the capillaries are close to the surface in the tongue and mucous membranes.   He didn’t keep antivenin because it was $100 per dose and had a shelf life of 30 days.  Bring her in and he would give her an antibiotic and an antihistamine.

     So Iko, who loved to ride in the back of the pickup and would easily jump in anytime the tailgate was lowered, had to be helped into the pickup for a fifteen minute visit to the vet’s office.  By the next morning her energy had returned.  The only ill effects beyond the first night after the bite, was a swelling that affected first one jaw for a day, the other jaw on the second day, and her entire face on the third day. 

     By the fourth day everything was back to normal.  After that, any snake that crossed Iko’s path was a dead snake.  She would grab them behind the head where they couldn’t bite her and shake them with her powerful neck and jaws.  They would pop like a bull whip and they would be dead.         

      There would be no more snake problems as long as Iko was on the premises.

      In the annals of the earth, man and dog surpass the rattlesnake’s ability to kill.