by Gordon Grice
The mantid took another step away. The cricket-beast, which had been sluggish up to now, leaped. The mantid was knocked wings over teakettle, landing a few inches away. As he tried to regain his “feet,” the beast pounced again. This time it landed squarely on the mantid and bear-hugged him. Then it began to eat the mantid in a leisurely but methodical way, its many mouth parts wiggling like fingers. It chewed the mantid’s face off first, and continued downward, not even pausing at the thick carapace. The four of us watching were amazed and repulsed. The others were not avid bug-watchers, as I am, but the spectacle was so intense in its microcosmic way that no one could stop looking.
In ten minutes the mantid was gone. Nothing remained but his transparent wings. The cricket-beast crawled sluggishly to the center of the jar.
RATTLESNAKE
It lies half-coiled in a stand of dusty green weeds, its jaw against the ground to catch the vibrations of any moving thing. Its body, patterned with the colors of dead grass and earth, is touching a stack of iron pipe. Its forked black tongue slips out of its closed mouth, slashes in several directions, and slips back in (think of a person sucking down a strand of fettuccine). It is licking up particles of airborne scent and brushing them against the mass of olfactory nerves in the roof of its mouth. Its pupils, which would be only slits in the sun, have ballooned in the near-dark.
The rattlesnake has followed a scent along the pipes, and here it stops to wait at the turning of a scent-path. The prey, whatever it is, has the habit of following the shape of these discarded pipes. Probably it has a nest among them. The rattlesnake is still except for its active tongue, which slides out every few seconds, invisible in the dusk except for its gleam.
I don’t see the field mouse arrive. He is suddenly there, tentative in his movements, a run of a few inches and then a pause. His coat is pale brown on top and white on bottom; his eyes are the sleek brown of apple seeds. He stops, runs to one side, stops, runs back the other direction, stops and rises on his hind legs. He seems to know something is wrong, but probably that’s my imagining. I look to the snake and can’t see it—only dirt and weeds and scraps of iron. I blink a few times and there it is in exactly the same place, my eyes and brain finally interpreting its pattern.
The mouse is a few inches from the safety of the pipes, but he darts around in the open. Does he smell the snake? I can’t decide whether I smell it or not. The mouse runs onto a higher clump of dirt to look around and sniff. But it’s not a clump of dirt. He is standing on a thick loop of the snake. The snake does not move.
The mouse comes down and moves away from the pipes. A blurred movement, the rustle of one weed— something happens too fast for me to see. The mouse leaps into the air but makes no sound. He lands on his feet, takes a step or two, defecates, and stands shivering. The snake slides back a few inches. It isn’t moving now, but it’s watching with the heat-sensing pits below its eyes. Its strike, gauged by means of the pits, has hit home. The pits work with heat as human eyes do with light, creating stereoscopic “vision” and thus a fine discrimination of direction and distance.
The mouse rolls on his side, breathing heavily, spasms rocking the forelegs and head. The snake waits. After a long while it slips closer. Its tongue runs over the mouse, which is still twitching. The snake makes a half-circle and settles its head near the mouse’s. The mouse still appears alive to me, but the snake has its heat-sense and may know something I don’t. Alive or dead, the mouse has already begun to be digested. The venom is breaking down cell walls; tissues are flooding with blood; the flesh is softening.
The rattlesnake swallows the mouse head-first, the hollow tube of its glottis pushing to the front of its mouth at the bottom so that it can breathe while it eats, its delicate bones momentarily separating, its muscles working and rippling. The swallowing is a long process; the mouse remains partly visible for perhaps five minutes. Before he disappears entirely, I see a hind leg twitch, and then for a long while only the mouse’s dark tail hangs out, and then it is gone.
Two men were hunting in the woods in midwinter. They came upon a clearing where a seven-foot Eastern diamondback lay soaking in the sun, sluggish in the cold. The hunters knew of a man in town who made money by milking the venom from rattlesnakes; he sold the venom to a pharmaceutical company for use in making antivenin. They decided to catch the snake and sell it to the venom collector.
Catching it was easy. The snake was cold and slow. One man grasped it behind the head and around the middle. He knew it couldn’t bite him in this position. They got into the pickup and headed for town.
The heater was on in the pickup.
They reached town and were about to get out of the truck. The man holding the snake had grown complacent on the ride to town; the snake had grown warm. The man must have relaxed his grip for a second. The snake whipped suddenly, too fast to react to. Its two fangs punched into his arm.
The swelling started minutes after the bite, while they were driving to the hospital. Eventually his arm purpled and gleamed with the sheen of leaking plasma. It grew to Popeye proportions; they had to cut the shirt to get it off. The skin ripped open. He bled from his mouth and nose and from the pores of his skin. His arm broke out in tiny blisters. He was in intensive care for four days, a nightmare time in which the doctors used calm, soothing tones to discuss his “hypotensive crisis” and the amputation of his arm. Finally, in a sort of Faustian bargain, he was allowed to keep the arm in return for the sacrifice of his hand. He handles a fork well enough with the stump of his thumb.
“I wouldn’t even touch a rattler that size,” said the venom collector, the one they’d planned to sell it to.
The metaphor scientists often use is a cocktail: the venom of a rattlesnake is a cocktail of diverse toxins. There are more than thirty rattlesnake species between Canada and Argentina, and many of them have subspecies, bringing the total to over ninety. Each subspecies serves a different mix, and each snake makes individual variations on that recipe. The Mojave species packs a neurotoxin that blinds you, then makes you forget to breathe and paralyzes your heart.
Most rattler venoms break flesh down chemically. They partly digest the snake’s prey before it is eaten. In fact, rattlesnake venoms evolved from digestive juices, and the poison gland of the rattlesnake is a specialized salivary gland. A good dose of venom makes your limb burn with pain as the venom digests it. Chunks of a human victim’s skin and flesh may die and eventually fall off. No rattlesnake is big enough to eat a human, but the venom is strong enough to go a considerable way toward predigesting one.
Small animals usually die of shock long before the venom has softened them up, and the same can happen to a human. We can also die from such systemic effects as damage to the liver or kidneys, or from gangrene of the dead flesh.
A bigger snake is more likely to kill you because it has more venom to spend. That fact makes the diamondbacks, the biggest rattlesnakes, especially dangerous. Rattlers have personalities and moods; one rattler may crawl away while another stays to fight. Western diamondbacks generally have less patience for a human than most. They’ve been known to chase a man across open ground.
Snakes choose whether to waste venom on you—they can bite dry if they want to, or give you only a little venom. They need the venom for hunting, and it takes time to produce. One collector I talked to, Steve Barnum, has been bitten dozens of times. He said three-quarters of his bites proved dry. He described the symptoms of the loaded bites as “swelling, blood- and water-blisters, and a hell of a lot of pain.” Most loaded bites, Barnum said, turn out to be only minor medical problems, a claim borne out by statistics: in the United States, fewer than a dozen of the thousands of people bitten by rattlesnakes in an average year die. A doctor friend told me giving rattlesnake antivenin is a risk rarely in the best interest of the patient, though the possibility of malpractice suits prompts most doctors to give it anyway. The antivenin can send a patient into a fatal anaphylactic shock.
Of course, some surv
ivors find the bite of a rattlesnake has altered their lives.
At a rural construction site, one man was directing the heavy equipment by hand signals. The sound of the machinery drowned out human voices. It also drowned out the warnings of a prairie rattler that lay in the same weedy ditch where the man stood. He felt a sting on his leg, but ignored it—thorns from the weeds, he thought. He ignored it a second time, but the third sting got his attention. He saw the snake among the weeds, three feet long and thick as an axe handle. He beheaded it with a tire iron before asking his coworkers to drive him into town for treatment. It was fifteen miles.
At the hospital, the doctor presented him with a dilemma. “You can stay here until something happens, and then we can treat what happens,” the doctor said. The “something” the doctor assured him was coming within twenty-four hours would present itself in the form of either a stroke or a heart attack. His blood pressure was already soaring.
“Or we can start you on a course of antivenin, which is expensive.” The antivenin cost several thousand dollars per dose, and there was no telling how many doses he would need before the crisis passed.
He chose the antivenin. He passed through the usual prairie rattler bite symptoms: blood pressure rising in response to the neurotoxin, leg swelling, burning pain. He endured the treatment: an IV of glucose and pain killers, hourly blood tests, hourly checks of his blood pressure. His recovery appeared complete; his only trouble was the hospital bill, which ran into the thousands.
A few weeks after he left the hospital, he blacked out.
That blackout was only the first. He also had bouts of giddy weakness and mood swings. His doctors suspected diabetes, but after extensive tests they had to revise that hypothesis. The man was suffering from wildly fluctuating levels of blood sugar, a condition caused by the malfunction of specialized cells in the pancreas. But the problem was not conventional diabetes, and it could not be treated with insulin injections. It was unpredictable.
Now the man eats a diabetic’s diet and tries to listen to his body. Probably he will never recover, but maybe he can manage his condition, which doctors call an aftereffect of his encounter with the rattlesnake.
Rattlesnakes like to stay in holes in the ground when they are not hunting or basking, but they’re not equipped for digging. Their transitory hunting-season homes are shelters they acquire opportunistically—they simply find the place and move in, killing any occupant that objects. Rattlesnakes are often found in the former dens of prairie dogs, rabbits, and even badgers. Prairie dogs, large rodents that live in towns of hundreds, invented the neighborhood watch system long ago. Guards stand on their hind legs to watch and warn the others.
A prairie dog guard sees a rattlesnake coming and chirps the alarm. The adult prairie dogs defend their burrows, throwing their tails up to appear menacing and making bluff charges at the snake. They work in teams, one distracting while another rushes in for a bite. The rodents have formidable teeth and can kill a rattlesnake, though they rarely manage to. Some people say prairie dogs will seal a rattlesnake in their own burrow once he’s inside, entombing him alive, Poe-style.
Sometimes prairie dogs turn the snake away from their burrows. Sometimes they don’t. The snake alternates strikes and sizzling retreats, and eventually a strike lands. The prairie dog has only a few minutes to live. He convulses and dies. His comrades give up the fight. The snake retreats momentarily to save his energy while the bitten dog dies. He doesn’t eat the dead prairie dog. He smells something better.
Inside the burrow, the snake finds a litter of prairie dog pups. He decides to stay for dinner. The mother comes into the litter chamber to threaten him, but he’s busy eating. He buzzes a bit. She leaves.
The snake makes his living in the prairie dog town, exterminating one family and living in their burrow until he’s hungry again, when he moves into the open, setting off the chirping alarms again until he conquers the next burrow. So much for the advantages of city living.
Rattlesnakes aren’t picky. They like warm blood and cold, so long as it’s warm enough to detect. They eat rodents of all kinds, a smorgasbord of lizards, cottontail rabbits, and birds on the ground or in the trees.
Ground squirrels frequently grace the menu. A snake learns a particular hole in the ground has good eats. He returns again and again to this same burrow, where the resident ground squirrels deliver litter after doomed litter.
The mating of rattlesnakes is sometimes preceded by a sort of combat dance between the males. They rear up, pressing their bodies together, knocking each other to the ground until one has had enough. Sometimes the males twine together, one pulling himself taut to send the other hurtling away, thrown like an old-fashioned top with a string. These fights, if that’s what they are, also happen when females are not present, perhaps because of territorial disputes.
The male keeps his double penis inside his body, turned inside out like a pair of socks, until he is ready to mate. After he has draped himself on a willing female and done some rubbing—a sort of foreplay—one of his hemipenes extrudes itself from his vent (which one he uses is simply a matter of the happy couple’s position). He inserts the spiked hemipenis into the female’s vent.
The female can store the sperm for years. She may mate in succeeding years and then produce a litter sired by several fathers. In colder climates, she does nothing but eat for several short summers, building up the fat supply necessary for carrying young. She may take five years to produce a litter. The young—as few as one or more than two dozen—reside in a rudimentary kind of placenta, which is virtually an internal egg, before their mother bears them live. A mother rattlesnake does nothing in the way of child care except to strike at anyone who comes close.
Rattlesnakes are born venomous. They can already hunt for themselves. My father once reached into a patch of grass and was struck on the fingernail by a baby rattlesnake. The nail eventually blackened and fell off. He suffered no other effects. Some people claim young rattlesnakes are more toxic than adults. Possibly the explanation for this paradox is that young rattlesnakes show less restraint in using up their supplies of venom when biting defensively. A certain medical student, assuming the young harmless, handled one. He showed off for friends, telling them how ironic it is that such an emblem of fear could be handled freely. That’s the way most people get bitten: an urge to handle fire. These days the young doctor has nine fingers.
Rattlesnakes are scavengers as well as predators. The exquisite heat-sensing organs that make them ideal hunters of warm, living things also allow them to sense the recently dead. Their discrimination of temperatures is fine to the thousandths of a Fahrenheit degree. They swallow road-killed squirrels and rabbits, which lie on the shoulders of highways radiating warmth.
Like most snakes, they know many ways to move. A simple design makes them versatile. They can move in S-shaped curves, with the outer surface of each curve serving to brace the body so that it pushes forward. They can creep in a straight line by rippling the abdominal muscles. They can sidewind, using loops of their bodies as feet and essentially walking across loose sand. One desert species is named the sidewinder because it likes to use this trick. The sidewinder leaves tracks like those of a tank. It’s not a large snake, but the sight of it thrashing epileptically across the gypsum sands, its eyes shaded by scaly horns, is enough to make most people invoke a deity or two.
Rattlers can climb trees in search of birds and their eggs. A friend of mine went fishing at a lake in north Texas and saw dozens of limbs festooned with cotton-mouth moccasins and diamondback rattlers. Rattlers can squeeze into tight places and crawl on any kind of surface. They swim beautifully, holding their tails daintily above the water to keep their rattles dry. The beads need to be dry for a crisp sound.
Scientists observed a female Great Basin rattlesnake coiling tightly in the rain. By the time the rain stopped, the groove between two coils of her body held about two inches of rain. The snake drank for half an hour from the cup of her
own coils.
I have heard rattlesnake stories all my life. When I told my neighbors I meant to write about rattlesnakes, the stories flooded me. Many of them were obvious myth— the tree killed by a rattler’s strike, the giant specimen guarding a hoard of conquistadors’ gold. Others seemed plausible until I tried to trace them to the friend-of-a-friend eyewitnesses. Then they evaporated.
If you want to know how big rattlers get, you can find any length you like, up to fifty feet, in the stories. I heard as truth a story about a woman in Wyoming who shot a thirty-footer. As one researcher told me, “Snakes are like fish”—meaning the ones that get away. Their dead bodies bloat to impressive girths, and their flensed skins stretch a couple of feet beyond their living capacities, supporting extravagant claims. It’s hard to guess the size of a snake, and with rattlers the danger makes it unlikely that anybody will make a point of taking an exact measurement.
Scientists draw the line at about eight feet and forty pounds, though some of them will admit a few freak diamondbacks approach nine feet. One research center has a standing offer of twenty thousand dollars to anyone who can produce a live eight-foot diamondback; they haven’t had to pay. Science insists on seeing proof, which is a reasonable protection against exaggeration, but it’s not a logical way to assess the upper limits of snake size. What are the odds that the biggest specimen in the world will ever run into a biologist with a camera and a tape measure? For what it’s worth, one prehistoric rattlesnake species went about twelve feet.
Unlike mammals, snakes have no genetically determined size limits. They grow until they die. Their growth starts out fast but slows as they age, so that they are adding only fractions of an inch by the time they reach their twenties. Factors like nutrition and climate influence growth, but generally a big snake is an old snake. The lifespan for rattlesnakes seems to be around twenty-five years, but most rattlers don’t reach the “natural” age of death. They die long before they get huge, victims of disease or enemies.