Rattled
It makes our hearts pound and our palms sweat. But superstition and folklore have poisoned our minds against Texas’ scariest snake.
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If you want to know how big rattlers get, you can find any length you like, up to fifty feet, in the stories. As one researcher told me, “Snakes are like fish”—meaning the biggest are the ones that get away. Their dead bodies bloat to impressive girths, and their flensed skins stretch a couple of feet beyond their living capacity, supporting extravagant claims. Scientists draw the line at about eight feet and forty pounds. For what it’s worth, one prehistoric rattlesnake species went about twelve feet. But unlike mammals, snakes have no genetically determined size limits. They grow until they die. Their growth starts out fast and slows as they age, but generally a big snake is an old snake. The lifespan for most rattlesnakes seems to be around 25 years, although most rattlers never reach the “natural” age of death. They die long before they get huge, victims of disease or enemies. A pet theme of nature writers and scientists is the unfair hatred humans have for snakes. It is often claimed that adults teach children to hate and fear snakes early. I suspect learned fear is only part of the story. It seems to me there is really an innate fear of snakes, not only in humans but also in many other mammals. The rattlesnake has served as a kind of lightning rod for human hatred of snakes. Their venom provides a pragmatic reason for their killing, which can easily become a pretext even when other, less logical motives are the real ones.
Snakes as a group excel at scaring enemies. The rattlesnake has special equipment for this purpose. The rattler’s buzz is nothing like a rattle. It is something like trickling water, and something like dry leaves on cement. It nudges my subconscious first, and then I am aware of a tickle between my shoulder blades, and I know what I’m hearing. The recognition comes fast, but I am always disturbed by the feeling that the sound was there before I heard it. This effect is universal with humans. Its cause is unknown but perhaps resides in the ultrasonic portion of the sound. This reaction suggests that our fear of the rattler is instinctive, perhaps ingrained through long generations of human, and prehuman, danger.
In the American Southwest there’s a tradition of killing rattlesnakes as a point of etiquette. It goes back to at least the middle of the nineteenth century. The idea was to kill any rattler you found, even if it wasn’t threatening you, so that it couldn’t bite somebody else another day. Rattlesnake hunts or roundups are a ritualized, and commercialized, version of this old custom. Roundups reportedly began as a way for farmers to make their fields safer to work in. Today the rattlesnake roundup, like that held in Sweetwater, is a tourist attraction, featuring such amusements as measure-offs, cookouts, and bagging competitions. There’s something archetypal in these events; they’re like pagan celebrations of spring.
Whatever advantages the rattler’s venom may provide, they don’t include freedom from violence. Observers have seen horses go out of their way to trample rattlesnakes. Other hoofed herbivores—pronghorn antelope, deer, cattle, sheep, goats—also actively attack rattlesnakes. The extravagant violence between reptile and bird makes a more obvious kind of sense than the preemptive killings by hoof. Rattlesnake and mockingbird are natural enemies whose relation hinges on predation, the snake trying to eat the bird’s young, the bird getting nasty at first sight of the snake. A golden eagle will pluck a rattler from a vast expanse of wind-rippled grass. You see the silhouette rise into the sky: the bird’s wings slapping the air like sheets on the line, the snake twisting and knotting in the rugged talons that have already dealt him fatal wounds.
The rattler is lethal at one end and scary at the other, but in between it’s a tube of protein irresistible to many predators. Hawks and owls take rattlers, but so do some less obvious avian predators, like wild turkeys and domestic chickens. The roadrunner specializes in rattlers and never seems to get bitten. Other rattlesnake predators include domestic cats and pigs, skunks, badgers, bobcats, coyotes, and foxes, and other snakes like king snakes and coachwhips.
To some animals, the rattler is only a potential meal; to an astounding number of others, it is something so fearsome it must be either fled from or killed on sight. No other animal provokes such visceral reactions from other species. When I was a child, my father killed a rattler near our yard. He decapitated it with a hoe, and I watched it pulse for what seemed like hours. The snake, a very small one, kept twitching, even after our white leghorn hens came and started to work on it with their beaks. At dusk I came back (I was forbidden to, but I came). It was still alive enough to shrink from my touch.
Folklore says a decapitated rattlesnake doesn’t die until sundown. The restless one I watched as a child was no aberration; beheaded rattlers often make this lore credible. Their movements diminish gradually, and no moment of death can be specified. But the movements clearly outlast an injury that should, according to everything we think we know, prove instantly fatal. We approach the rattler with such an awareness of its deadly potential that its failure to die neatly becomes terrifying.
We would like to think death is a crisp fracture: living, and then not living. In fact, there is no clear division between life and death in any animal. Death isn’t still. It is a continuation of what has gone before. The digestive juices in our gut lose their inhibitions and go to work on the organs that hold them. The bacteria that have been part of our bodies go on living. Suddenly freed to partake of the feast they have always dwelt inside, they prosper as never before. Our tissues, if left alone, take on an array of strange forms as microscopic life converts them. The blood gels, the breath quiets, the tiny strands of lightning inside the nerve tissues disappear. Death is real, but it is slow and sloppy. Dead, we are not stilled; we are activated, changed.
On the highway ahead, i see the sinuous curves of a rattlesnake in motion. He moves on the hot asphalt in liquid esses. He is doomed. Cars and trucks rush by, some straddling the snake, others swerving to miss him (perhaps these drivers know the legend of the mechanic killed by a fang embedded in a flat tire). Soon one of them will crush him, by chance or by choice. He halts and buzzes on the yellow line. I pull over and wait my opportunity to chase him off the road, but the traffic is heavy. A one-ton pickup finally swerves to hit him.
I watch his body spasm into twisting arcs, the white belly and patterned back showing by turns. It is the old dance of animal flesh: the dying, and the determination not to die.
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