I went down to the cemetery, but Warren wasn’t any more sympathetic than Claire. You don’t need a man to look after you? You need a man to whup your tail like Earl done. God damn it anyway. You got a good man who loves you and you don’t treat him no better than you treated your jerk of a husband. Don’t come back here till you get this nonsense out of your head.
Crotalus horridus horridus eats mice, shrews, chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits, bats, and also birds, bird eggs, other snakes, and amphibians and in turn is eaten by badgers, hawks, king snakes and racers, and hogs. The major threat to the long-term survival is habitat degradation and destruction; and rattlesnake roundups, like the ones in Texas, where thousands of snakes are slaughtered every year; and the commercial skin and live pet trade (boot companies in Texas and Tennessee); and the meat trade; and the novelty trade (stuffed and mounted snakes, jewelry, watchbands, and the like).
It was a big project. Cramer had been preparing all winter, scrambling around for funding. In Little Egypt rattlesnakes tend to snooze through the winter without actually hibernating, but up north they aggregate in the fall (like gypsies) and spend the winter together in dens below the frost line, sleeping in each other’s arms, so to speak. They’re vulnerable because if a farmer or rattlesnake hunter discovers the den, he can dynamite it—though dynamiting is illegal—or remove so many snakes that the colony is no longer viable. They emerge in the spring and mate in early summer before dispersing. But how do they choose a den in the first place? Some dens have been occupied since the beginning of time (as far as anyone knows). Other apparently ideal den sites remain empty. How far do rattlesnakes travel in the summer? How do they find their way back to their den? What would happen if you moved (translocated) an entire colony to a site that already had an existing colony? To a site where there was no existing colony? Would the snakes disperse, or would they stay together? The translocation of snakes has received very little systematic scientific attention. That’s why Cramer was so excited. I was excited too.
Cramer’s plan was to capture the snakes as soon as we had a spell of warm weather—capture them when they were just waking up, before they became active in April and started wandering all over the place. He wanted to release them in a suitable denning area on state-owned land before the end of April. So we still had six to eight weeks to prepare and two weeks to implant the radio transmitters. We’d have the snakes in captivity for a month at most, and we had to set up a serpentarium or hot-snake lab in a storage area in the basement, the only place we could find with running water and enough room for the forty Neodesha escape-proof cages with triple latches on glass doors that could be locked, and two big soapstone tables and cabinets for the surgical equipment. The cages couldn’t be stacked, so special shelves had to be built to hold them, and the room had to be rewired for forty individual heaters, one in each cage, and it had to be snake-proofed. Cramer was a fanatic on safety protocols. There are only three things to remember, he said, over and over: one, security; two, security; three, security. All the vents and ducts required special snake-proof grates; the doors required special seals, and so on. “If someone gets bit and drops dead, I don’t want the snake to be able to get out of the room.”
No one was to enter the lab who wasn’t certified. The list of those permitted to enter was not a long one: Cramer, Laura, Frank, and I, two local veterinarians; and two other biology professors. The three biology professors were the only ones with keys.
The setup was very different from the Church of the Burning Bush. At the church a certain amount of effort went into keeping children away from the snakes, but snakeboxes were left lying around, and if a snake got loose it was no big deal. Someone would pick it up and put it back in its box. But if a snake were to get loose in the lab it would be a major emergency. There were procedures to be followed. These were posted on the inside of the door and on the outside of the door. If you were going to be working with a hot snake, you had to put up a sign on the outside of the door. And so on. Emergency telephone numbers were posted.
By mid-March the lab was ready and we’d completed mountains of paperwork to comply with Illinois Administrative Code, Title 17: Conservation. Cramer’s five-year radio-telemetry translocation project didn’t really fit one of their categories, but in the end they made it fit: It would bring together the overlapping disciplines of population ecology and genetics, behavioral biology, conservation biology, and speciation—enough research agendas to keep graduate students busy for years.
We made our move on the last Saturday in March, when the temperatures got up into the seventies. Jackson wanted to go too, but Cramer had said no. Jackson hadn’t been trained, hadn’t practiced with them, he wasn’t part of the team. Sorry.
We assembled at eight o’clock in the parking lot on the west side of Buehl Hall. Cramer got there first in a TF truck with a crew cab. He had brought moose-hide boots and heavy gloves for everyone. He’d also brought a pair of small shovels to open up the den. The shovels, and the newness of everything, especially the moose-hide boots, made me suspect that Cramer had figured out how to hunt rattlesnakes by reading a book. All the equipment in the back of the pickup—hooks and grabbers and tongs—was brand new, including my own favorite snake-handling tool, which I’d made out of a butterfly net. You could attach a canvas snake sack to the frame of the net. You couldn’t scoop up a snake, but you could persuade it to crawl in the sack.
And think about it. There were only two rattlesnakes in the herp lab at TF, and their venom sacs had been removed, so they were no longer “hot,” and besides, they were too old to put up any kind of resistance to being picked up with a hook. We might as well have been practicing with rubber snakes. And Cramer was planning to dig up the den with a couple of little shovels. It would take a week and a day. I’d brought a little bottle of gasoline and a fifty-foot plastic tube—just in case. The smell of gasoline would roust the snakes.
Laura and Frank soon joined us in Frank’s old VW, the kind that looked like a bug. Laura, who had tucked her curls into a straw hat, as if we were going on a picnic, had brought her own fashionable boots and protested when Cramer insisted she wear the moose-hide ones. Frank had brought a new camera and took a lot of pictures, mostly of Laura.
We drove past fields that would soon be planted with corn and soybeans through some backcountry that had never been farmed —about as deep into the country as you can get in central Illinois. I had driven around a lot, exploring, and still didn’t know where we were, but if you looked in Jackson’s Illinois County Atlas you’d see a wide-open area about fifteen miles south of town with no roads. You’d see a network of streams, and an old abandoned railroad that used to run from Stockwell to Hardin Springs, and an old railroad grade coming out of Homecroft. That’s where the snakes had to be.
Laura had discovered that I was also going to the ASIH meetings, and she wasn’t too happy about it. She would be giving a paper in one of the sessions for graduate students, but she didn’t see any reason for me to go, since I was only a lowly freshman and she was about to embark on her Ph.D. dissertation. She was also unhappy about sitting in the back seat with Frank, while I rode shotgun, and she kept leaning forward to discuss, with Cramer, the problem of settling her dissertation topic: she’d been planning to work on the phylogeography of North American rat snakes using mitochondrial DNA, but now she was wondering if it would be a good idea to switch to rattlesnakes.
I countered with some rattlesnake stories.
Frank, I thought, was basically a decent guy, but he was in love with Laura and nothing he did seemed to please her. He was a nervous type and reminded me of my cousin Raymond, who’d gotten bit by a copperhead once that cured him of Lyme disease. At least that’s what Earl said. Frank was trim and fit from running five miles every morning before breakfast, but he kept chewing on one strand of his long black hair. His dissertation was on population genetics; he worked with fruit flies, whose reproductive cycle is only seven to eleven days. I figured he’d volunteer
ed for the rattlesnake hunt in order to be with Laura.
We passed the house of the farmer who’d discovered the snakes in the first place and kept going on County Road N and turned off on a dirt track, an old access road, that stopped in the middle of nowhere. We left the truck and walked into the woods half a mile to the den. We’d have to carry the snakes back to the truck, each snake in its own canvas sack. Back in Naqada we just put them in a big garbage can and hauled the can out of the woods, but Cramer had nixed this idea because he was afraid the snakes would smother.
We lugged all our sacks and hooks and grabbers into the woods, following Cramer single file, not talking. We had a snake-bite kit, in case of an emergency, though according to Cramer traditional remedies were contraindicated: mouth suction, incising the bite across the fang marks, tourniquets, applying ice. Not good. But the kit contained a vacuum extractor that would work if you used it right away. And St. Francis Hospital in Colesville had agreed to maintain an adequate supply of CroFab antivenin.
We didn’t see much animal life except squirrels, fox squirrels and gray squirrels, which Cramer said almost never shared the same territory. What was going on? Another dissertation topic.
We followed Cramer along a creek that hadn’t had time to straighten itself out. He went right to the den, on a little bluff that rose up about twenty yards from the creek—a long way to carry the snakes.
As we set out equipment down at the den site, about ten or twelve deer gave us a quick look and disappeared into the woods.
It was chilly, but we’d worked up a sweat by the time we got to the den and we unbuttoned our coats. Cramer pulled out a hip flask of whiskey and passed it around.
“Now what?” Frank shifted back and forth on his feet, as if he had to go to the bathroom. He passed on the whiskey. Laura took a swig and handed the flask to me. I hadn’t tasted whiskey since I left Naqada. Jackson never kept any around, just beer and wine, and a supply of crème de cassis. It probably wasn’t a good idea, but I swigged anyway.
We got our gear laid out, and Cramer reminded us to be careful with the hooks, to lift the snakes in the center. If you grab a snake too high up and jerk it around you can break its neck, which sometimes happened in church, where the snake’s death would be attributed to the power of the Lord. Cramer knew a lot, but I had a feeling he’d never actually hunted rattlesnakes before.
I let Cramer and Frank dig for a while. They were trying to dig under the rocky ledge. It was hard going, even with the new shovels with pointed tips like a spade and serrated blades. It would have taken forever to open up the den the way they were going at it. After about fifteen minutes I took out my coil of plastic tubing and poked it down one of the holes into the den till I couldn’t poke it any further. I put my ear at the end of the tube. Nothing. I tried another hole. Nothing. Then a third hole. This time I could hear some singing. “They’re down there,” I said. I took my little bottle of gasoline from my coat pocket and poured a few drops into the end of the tube. Cramer made disapproving noises, but it was pretty clear by now that we’d never open up the den with the shovels. I blew on the end of the tube, sending gasoline fumes into the den. You can kill the snakes that way if you use too much gasoline, but Cramer didn’t know that. And then we waited. Now I was nervous. Impatient. But after about ten minutes we saw our first two rattlers. They stuck their heads out of two different holes and looked around. It didn’t take long for more snakes to emerge. I congratulated myself, since no one else was interested in doing it for me.
Most of the snakes were groggy, and the easiest thing would have been just to pick them up by their necks—gently—and drop them in the sacks, but protocol demanded that we use the hooks.
Most of the snakes were about three feet. Some of the younger ones were smaller. The largest one, about four feet, was wide awake and looked annoyed.
The whole thing, actually, was pretty wonderful. Not many people have seen what we saw: about thirty specimens of Crotalus horridus horridus all in one place. They’re smaller than your eastern diamondback, and not as feisty. There were some flashy rat snakes too, which often den with timber rattlers, but the timbers were beautiful in their own modest ground colors, basic browns and greens and yellows. It was an astonishing sight, and I was glad that Frank had brought his camera.
We faced each other—snakes and humans—like two football teams facing each other across the line of scrimmage, waiting for the referee to blow his whistle, or for the quarterback to call the play. But no one moved. Not for a long time. I didn’t know what the others were thinking, but I was thinking of a verse from the Bible: “There are three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: the way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.”
And I was thinking that someone had better do something. I attached one of the sacks to my butterfly-net frame and decided to face the four-foot snake that had lifted up its yellow head and was staring right at me with its lidless eyes. Earl would have pinned him with a forked stick. But you can hurt a snake that way, especially a big one. He’ll twist and turn and maybe break his neck. Or her neck.
I took a deep breath. The muscles in my arm were twitching. My heart was pounding. My feet and arms were tingling. I had my hook in one hand and my net in the other, and the snake and I faced each other like a couple of Roman gladiators. I was the one with the net and the three-pronged stick. Or maybe like two lovers who’ve taken all their clothes off for the first time and are sizing each other up.
I wanted to get the hook under its middle, a little toward the front, but when I touched him with the hook he exploded and went into a defensive coil, his rattle singing.
I moved toward him, staying out of striking range. About two feet. I distracted him with the net, holding it over his head. Snakes can’t strike up, which is why deer and horses can trample them so easily. Earl would sometimes wave a hankie over a snake and then reach down and scratch it right on top of its head. It would have been an impressive trick, but I decided against it.
I kept touching the snake with the hook, and every time I touched him, he struck, leaving gobs of yellow-orange venom on the hook itself and on the handle. I kept doing this to wear him down, and after a dozen strikes, he straightened out and started to head into the woods. I dropped the net and managed to get the hook under his middle and lift him up. He was heavy, probably about four pounds. Four pounds may not seem like much, but four pounds of twisting rattlesnake on the end of a stick will wear your arms out pretty fast.
“Hand me the sack” I barked. Nobody moved. I barked again: “The net. Somebody hold the net under him.” Finally Cramer held up the net. I tried to maneuver the snake tail first into the sack, but he kept swinging his head around to look at me. I twisted the hook one last time to slide him into the net, but he straightened out his neck, in a kind of clumsy strike, and glided over the edge of the net, his head sticking straight out into midair. I worked him back till most of the weight was over the sack. I lowered the hook suddenly and the snake disappeared into the sack.
I was hardly conscious of what had been happening. The other snakes were slowly coming to life. Some were singing. I put the net on the ground and blocked the snake with the handle of the hook while I unsnapped the net from the frame. I folded the top of the bag over and fastened it. The handle of the hook was still thick with venom.
We had our first rattlesnake. I was wild with excitement, which I did my best to conceal. This was better than being anointed.
There was venom on the net and on the sack as well as on the handle of the hook. I cleaned both sack, net, and hook with water from the stream, while Cramer passed the whiskey around again.
I could feel the power surging through me, not from being anointed, but from being in touch with something. What? A snake is just a snake, but still … I was psyched up.
Cramer suddenly moved into action, ordering everyone around, handin
g out equipment, wading in with his new tongs, forgetting his own advice about not stressing the snakes. I held the net for him and we bagged snakes two, three, and four. But too late for Cramer. I’d already established who was in charge.
The whiskey was hot and strong in my stomach.
By noon we’d bagged thirty-two snakes, including two gravid females. I could see each snake in detail, as though I were looking through a special magnifying lens that allowed me to register the number of rattles and scales over the forehead and at other key places without actually counting. I blew a little more gasoline into the den and a couple more snakes emerged. Cramer and I watched as Frank and Laura bagged them. A third snake—large, active, wide awake—crawled into the woods, moving slowly. I followed with my hook till we encountered a ground squirrel. I expected the squirrel to back off, but instead it stood up its rear paws, almost on tiptoe, and waved its tail back and forth. I’d seen this happen once or twice in Naqada, when we were hunting snakes. The hairs on the squirrel’s tail were erect, like a cat that’s been struck by lightning in a comic strip. The squirrel had probably been protecting its pups. In any case the snake backed off. We watched for a few minutes. Cramer was very interested. I hooked the snake and Laura bagged it.
It took half an hour to carry the bagged snakes back to the truck, and another half hour to get back to the new serpentarium. We spent the rest of the day getting the snakes into their new crates and labeling them. It was the end of a big day. I was tired, but my body was radiating heat and energy, and as I was about to lock the cage holding the big rattlesnake that had given me such a hard time at the beginning, I slid open the glass door and put my hand around the snake just to feel its strength. Like one of Jackson’s powerful erections! It only took four or five seconds, but I think Cramer noticed, because he looked at me over the tops of his glasses.
“I’m having a little trouble with this door,” I said. “It sticks.”
Snakewoman of Little Egypt Page 20