Its color was gray, head wedge-shaped, body cross-hatched. His disposition, though often shy and retiring was, at this moment, ill-tempered. And why not? He'd arrived early and taken this prime location at the head of the banquet table in order to be selective in his choice of foods. Now an overgrown bully had sauntered up and paused right alongside his position and, for all he knew, planned on horning in at his smorgasbord. Well, he couldn't help it--he exploded in anger and the castanets on the end of his tail began to whirr. . . .
My young wife of 18 months paused alongside the three-foot block that had been cut from the huge windthrown Douglas fir and glanced back along the trail to make sure I wan't dallying too far behind. Then the castanets began their chatter at her feet!
Jane levitated--that's the best way to describe it--turned in mid-air and vaulted back down the trail, touching down only twice before crashing headlong into me.
The lady had only the sketchiest of outdoors educations before falling in love with, and marrying, her Jim Bridger wannabe. Then came motherhood at a too-early age.
The point here is that my 19-year-old wife was, at this point, very much an outdoors novice. That's why, as we left the car, I told her I'd heard this was rattlesnake country. "I've never seen one during either of the other times I've been here, honey. But be aware." My advice might not have sunk in when she paused to get her breath at the block from the windthrown fir, but when she placed her hand on the log and the castanets began their angered cacaphony near the toe of her right tennis shoe, it all came flooding back.
For his part, the cross-hatched snake had slithered to this choice trailside location and coiled, raising fangs, and preparing to strike at the first juicy morsel to hop along the trail. Later, I made fun of Jane because she apparently wasn't juicy enough. (A word to the wise is due here: obnoxious humor doesn't play well to frightened wives.) The snake was, of course, hidden from any animals ascending the trail. neither did he have to peer around the log to know something approached since the heat-sensors called "pits" on each side of his face told him as much about his prey as he needed to know prior to engagement.
Venomous snakes with movable fangs and heat-sensing pits are called "pit vipers." Rattlesnakes mate in the spring in warmer climates, or in the fall in colder regions. Females may retain sperm within their oviducts for a considerable time and bear successive litters without additional matings. Gestation is usually five to seven months and can be influenced by climate.
All rattlesnakes bear their young live, averaging from eight to fifteen snakelets the size of small angleworms at a time. Females may reproduce every year, but in colder regions they may bear young only once every two years. They reach sexual maturity at about three years and have lived in captivity for over twenty.
Jane proved so effective at rattlesnake detection that first time out that I gave her a lifetime appointment to serve as our family's Chief Designated Reptile Decoy.
Over the years, she's been very good at it.
THE SNAKEMAN
"Ohh! Listen to that!"
"They sound mad!'
I could see the writhing snakes from where I sat; saw their finger-sized tails in the air, blurring as they played their ingrown castanets. But hear them I could not. Nothing I've ever experienced drove home my advancing age so positively.
It was our first-ever family gathering: our daughter Cheri and her husband Randy, our son Marc, and grandson Justin. We visited a guest ranch out of Townsend, Montana. Kelly Flynn, the ranch owner, arranged for us to visit a friend who is locally referred to as "the snakeman."
Chris Christensen, a Townsend Middle School art teacher, spends his idle time catching snakes. He's a polished expert at it. Chris studies snakes, using some for educational purposes in classrooms and for organizations, or shipping them to zoos and science labs. He also makes nifty leather goods from snakeskins: like wallets and belts and hatbands. Most he turns loose after keeping them for a period.
At the time we visited Chris in his backyard playground, he had 73 snakes in residence. The creatures were contained in glass-front boxes, about the size of beehives or apple crates. The fearless--make that insane--guy was giving his reptilian menagerie a bath. There were five-foot bull snakes, smaller garter snakes, and a swift-crawling blue racer. But upwards of fifty denizens of his herpetological display were prairie rattlesnakes. And just removing the canvas covering over their boxes caused them to set up a frightful din--so everybody else said.
It bothered me that I couldn't hear their cacaphony of whirrs, so I left my seat on a hay bale and approached the first box of caged rattlers. Five feet. Four feet. At three feet there seemed to be the inference of a buzz, but the truth was the sound wasn't stout enough to my fading ears to attract me while distractedly hiking afield.
My tragedy is that a rattlesnake's whirr would once send me pirouetting across wide ditches and low-lying mountain ranges. now I can only wonder when I stopped hearing their warnings and, most of all, how many may have told me to keep my distance without my ever knowing it.
Incidentally, if you're wondering how one bathes rattlesnakes, I'll pass along this first-hand account: Christensen begins with a big, plastic garbage can half-full of water. He reaches into a box writhing with angry snakes and, using a special snaring device he contructed himself, lifts out a snake and drops it into the waiting water. The reality is the snakes are there for a drink and several can be seen swimming around at the same time, gulping in the needed liquid. When they finish drinking and begin trying to climb out is when the Snakeman lifts them back to their cage.
Chris's snare is made from a four-foot section of a fiberglass fishing rod designed for surfcasting. The rod has three-inch finger-like clamps on its tip. The clamp is operated by a cable from a hand-grip on the rod's butt. The man simply thrusts the rod tip into a mass of snakes, wriggles it around until he can clamp a reptile just behind its venomous head, then applies enough presure on his hand-grip to hold the serpent until he can lift it from the box into the water.
The reverse is true on the return trip to their box. But the cage trapdoor is much smaller than the garbage can opening and sometimes Chris must catch a rattler's flopping tail with his free hand in order to better guide the creature into its box.
I asked the seemingly casual snakeman if he'd ever been bitten?
"Only by a bull snake," he said, holding out a scarred thumb. "He had an attitude problem."
Next week? A walk on the wild side.