by Gordon Grice
The largest rattlesnakes are those people never see. A rattlesnake risks death every time he meets a human. Some large rattlesnakes bear old scars made by human tools. Maybe these snakes, having been injured once, learned to avoid humans.
I mine the stories I hear. In the dross of fiction and exaggeration, I sometimes find the glimmer of truth:
A nine-month-old boy sat in a playpen on the lawn of his family’s home. His mother and several friends were a few feet away. The boy became mildly upset about something, but he only fussed a bit, and no one checked on him. Later the family deduced that the boy must have seen the little rattlesnake at that point. A few minutes later he screamed. The adults found the snake still in the playpen; the boy had been bitten repeatedly.
He survived after a long stay in the hospital. Because of damage caused by the venom, his nervous system never developed properly. Today, as an adult, he can’t drive a car, hold a job, or make change for a dollar.
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, and that this teaching is based on their own lack of understanding. My earliest memory involving a snake is of my mother and older sister talking fearfully about a rattlesnake on a country road. We were driving and had just passed the snake. I was too small to see the road from the car and did not know what “snake” meant. I remember asking questions and getting answers that intimated revulsion but did not explain what I really wanted to know, which was what a snake looked like.
That experience fits the stereotype of learned fear, but I’m not sure it was necessarily a bad thing, except for the lack of complete information. When I was a little older, I encountered a rattlesnake in my own front yard, and fear of it kept me out of danger. My mother had no way to instruct me in the subtle differences between varieties of snakes when I was a toddler.
Another piece of snake education that has stuck in my mind came when I was about six. My sister and I were taking turns pushing each other in a wagon. She suddenly screamed for me to stop pushing. Then she leaped out of the wagon and ran away, shouting “Snake! Snake!” I didn’t see the snake for a long time; it was wrapped around a post many times, its coils resembling the wrapping of a hangman’s noose, its head pointing to the ground, its eyes apparently staring straight at me. That sudden feeling that I was observed, that I had been observed long before I was aware of it, gave me the creeps. My father came to investigate. He looked for a moment, pronounced the creature a bull snake, and turned to leave.
“Aren’t you going to kill it?” I asked.
“He’s not hurting anybody,” my father said. That statement didn’t make me less cautious around snakes. A classmate of mine had suffered a bull snake bite to the big toe, so I knew that nonvenomous didn’t mean “friendly.” But my father’s remark did make me understand that there are several ways of seeing snakes.
The rattlesnake has served as a kind of lightning rod for human hatred of snakes. While other snakes are killed for no practical reason, the killing of rattlers has been institutionalized; their venom provides a pragmatic reason for their killing, which can easily become a pretext for killing even when other, less logical motives are the real ones.
I suspect learned fear is only part of the story. It seems to me there really is an innate fear of snakes, not only in humans but also in many other mammals.
Snakes as a group excel at scaring enemies. Cobras rear up and expand their necks into hoods; racers rush at intruders rampantly; corals have bright warning colors, and some harmless king snakes mimic the coral colors; the water moccasin flashes the fanged cotton-mouth, which inspired its other common name. The bull snake coils and hisses in a warning display. Some people say the bull snake is imitating the prairie rattler; the two wear similar colors. Several snakes, including the copperhead and the bushmaster, shake their tails in leaves or grass to produce a warning buzz, and the rattlesnake has special equipment for this purpose, the rattle apparently having evolved as an enhancement of the tail-shaking behavior.
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 suddenly 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.
Experiments with rats suggest another explanation. These experiments showed that sounds which provoke a reaction of fear in rats take an unusual route through the nervous system. Instead of traveling to the part of the brain that normally interprets sound, the neural message of the fear-producing sound goes directly to the limbic system. Thus, the rat reacts with fear quickly, presumably before he knows what he’s reacting to. In these particular experiments, the fear response was learned—the experimenters taught the rats to associate a tone with an electric shock. The human reaction to the rattlesnake’s buzz does not have to be learned. People who have never seen a rattlesnake get the same tickling sensation in the back of the neck on first hearing the buzz. The reaction occurs when the buzz is used in recorded music and isn’t even consciously recognized. This reaction suggests that our fear of the rattler is instinctive, perhaps ingrained through long generations of human, and prehuman, danger. However, the human race came to the Americas, where rattlesnakes are found, only about ten thousand years ago. It may be that the fear reaction is even more universal than it first appears, a fundamental aspect of having a mammalian nervous system.
Add to the snakes’ own artistry our fear of anything different—the snake eats and makes love and shelters himself from the cold like we do, but he moves without legs, like something purely hungry, purely sexual. My accountant and I were swapping rattlesnake stories one afternoon, and I mentioned the idea that we hate and fear them by instinct.
“Ever since the Garden,” he said.
Venom makes its user a specialist. Whereas more primitive snakes simply swallow prey, or else suffocate it by constriction, venomous snakes have the option of delivering a killing strike and then allowing their prey to die before moving in for a meal. This tactic spares them some of the danger involved in overpowering prey; living prey can bite and claw.
The venomous bite has evolved independently in many different animals, from octopi to shrews. It even evolved independently in different types of snakes. No one knows exactly how it came about in rattlesnakes, but some clues can be found in the behavior of the monitor lizards.
The monitors constitute the lizard family most closely related to snakes. This relationship is not hard to spot once you’ve seen a large monitor move: it walks on legs, but with an ophidian essing of the body. In the largest monitor, the Komodo dragon, the males engage in courtship battles similar to those of rattlesnakes, rising into the air as they push against each other in a sort of sumo match. And, most snakelike of all, the Komodo dragon smells by constantly lashing the air with its forked, black tongue.
The big lizard (up to about ten feet and three hundred pounds) can find fresh carrion more than a mile away by scent. Its sense of smell is, in fact, more acute than that of a bloodhound, which itself can seem almost supernatural to us. But the dragon doesn’t restrict its diet to carrion; it also actively hunts, and its predatory technique is strikingly similar to that of the rattlesnake. The dragon rushes the prey—which can be something as large as a pig, a deer, or a human child—and delivers a toothy bite. Then it allows the prey to escape, and tracks it by scent. The dragon has no venom; the tactic works because of the festering meat between the reptile’s teeth, which makes the bite septic. In the hot, humid tropics, a septic bite can kill a big animal in a couple of hours.
The rattlesnake’s venom may be a refinement of a septic-bite tactic, which both the monitors and the rattlesnake’s ancestors might have de
veloped to complement their extraordinary smelling abilities—an example of convergent evolution. Killing by septic bite is also a feline tactic. The lynx uses it on young caribou. Many people mauled by lions have died from wounds that should have been survivable: the meat caked under the attackers’ claws and teeth injected the victims with disease, and they died in a gangrenous fever.
Evolutionary theory suggests that the rattlesnake’s venom would improve its chances of survival. Reality, however, proves more complicated than theory. While the venom enhances the rattler’s success as a hunter, it also creates unique survival problems.
In the American Southwest, there’s a tradition of killing rattlesnakes as a point of etiquette. It goes back at least to 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. Farmers and cowboys would decapitate rattlesnakes with a whip or a lariat, striking from a safe distance. Nowadays people more often kill rattlers by running over them on the road.
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. The tradition began in colonial times, with an entire community setting aside a day to catch or kill every rattlesnake they could. The snakes gathered were boiled to produce snake oil, one of the infamous “medicines” sold by traveling hucksters. The Okeene, Oklahoma, chamber of commerce boasts the first roundup in the modern sense; essentially, it’s a tourist attraction. Okeene and other towns, like Sharon Springs, Kansas, and Sweetwater, Texas, hold annual festivals featuring such amusements as measure-offs, cookouts, bagging competitions, flea markets, dancing shows, carnivals, and exhibitions of bravery such as people sleeping in snake cages. There’s something archetypal in these events: they’re like pagan celebrations of spring. In one town the roundup is always scheduled to follow Easter by a week.
There are no festivals for nonvenomous snakes, and no point of etiquette in killing them. The rattlesnake’s venom makes it a target for predators—in this case, humans.
Recall the smell of a restaurant that serves fresh lobster but isn’t scrupulous about cleaning the lobster tank. Now, in your imagination, dry this smell out, and spice it with the dried rust of old water pipes. For the sound, imagine being in a shower, the water pressure rising and falling erratically.
This is the Rattlesnake Pit.
The so-called pit is not underground. It is a fence of welded iron and lumber set on the cement floor of a community building in Waynoka, Oklahoma, where the roundup is under way. The fence is five feet high and runs about twenty feet by ten, and inside it at this moment are 203 rattlesnakes. Two men work the pit. They use metal rods to unstack the snakes in the corners, where they tend to accumulate. Unstacking is necessary because even though these snakes can’t climb a smooth five-foot perpendicular, they might be able to use each other’s bodies as steps to shorten that distance.
The pit contains prairie rattlers and Western diamondbacks. Each year the longest prairie rattler caught in this roundup runs about four and a half feet, and none of the prairie rattlers in the pit is up to that mark. They are slender, though their girth increases slightly from neck to near the tail. The longest diamondbacks listed in the roundup records exceed seven feet. Of the ones in the pit, only a few approach six feet. The hunters keep their best catches of both species until the measure-off; the pit is full of their rejects.
One of the men in the pit, a powerfully built, sloping three-hundred-pounder, uses a special metal rod—a snake hook—to pin the head of a big diamondback to the cement floor. He seizes the snake, index finger atop the head, thumb opposing the other fingers at the sides of its neck, and picks it up. He brings it around to show everybody, face to face. People are packed two or three deep around the pit, children holding each other up to see, men suddenly pinching women from behind to make them think they’ve been bitten, the mass of people smelling of whiskey and cotton candy and sweat and Marlboros—but the snakes smell stronger.
The handler holds the snake’s open mouth two inches from my camera lens. The hooked fangs drip venom that looks like cloudy white wine. The smaller teeth that lie in paired stripes on top and bottom are not visible; all I can see of them is the holes through which they have retracted. The holes are swollen and red, probably from the handler’s having pushed the snake’s head against the floor to catch him.
“How many times you been bit?” a spectator asks.
“A few,” the big handler says.
He deflects most of the questions in this way until someone says, “Are you ever afraid one of ’em will reach up and bite you in the balls?” Then he becomes animated.
“Only me and the gal that does my laundry know how much.”
The other handler comes by a little later, kicking a pile of snakes out of the corner. They flare up at him, raising their heads shaped like the spades on poker cards, pulling back along the looped lengths of their own bodies to strike, their noise increasing as the hiss of a fire does when you throw on gasoline. The man is wearing heavy boots, and most of the strikes bounce off. One big diamondback hangs a fang in the man’s jeans, and man and snake have to wrestle a moment to be free of each other. Later, another snake strikes the man’s boot and leaves a half-teaspoon of venom on the scuffed leather. “He was pumped up, wasn’t he?” the man says.
A third handler enters the pit. He catches a six-foot diamondback and holds it by the tail; it lifts its head, making its body a parabola. Its black forked tongue flits and gleams. The handler gives it to a girl perhaps ten years old standing outside the pit. She holds it by the tail for a minute before handing it back. Now everyone is reaching for it. The handler shows them how to grasp it—thumb up, rattle up, at arm’s length, so that the snake can’t double himself against gravity and score a bite. “He’s heavy,” a woman says. The handler takes the snake back and considers.
“About a seventeen-pounder,” he says.
At the other side of the pit a man appears with a gunnysack. A handler lifts diamondbacks into the sack with a snake hook. The man with the sack goes to a back room. I follow for the butchering.
The contents of the gunnysack are dumped into a fifty-five-gallon barrel, which echoes metallically with the buzzing of the snakes. One man uses a mechanical grabber to seize a diamondback by the head. He holds the head down on the chopping block, never letting his artificial grip loosen.
A second man grabs the tail with his bare hands. They straighten the snake, which fights them. They slap at its curves to make it relax. A third man measures about six inches back from the head and slams his hatchet home. The snake writhes, both its neck and its headless body twisting. The man with the grabber drops the head into a green plastic bucket already half full of heads. The hatchet man points the wounded body into a barrel to let it bleed out. The blood stops in less than a minute.
The hatchet man sets down his hatchet and takes up a filleting knife that hangs from a chain attached to his belt loop. After slapping the headless, twisting body into submission again, he makes one long incision from the neck wound to the vent. He peels the skin back from the neck; it comes off easily, like the skin of a banana. He stops skinning at the tail and chops; the tail and skin go into another bucket. He reaches into the long incision he has made and pulls out the organs, along with a string of yellow globules of fat. They are all neatly contained in a membrane that pulls out easily.
What’s left is a long sleeve of muscle and bone. It still writhes a little. A woman takes the sleeve and puts it into a sink full of soapy water. Its writhing accelerates until it is rising out of the sink in great hoops. The woman seems unperturbed. She washes the outside and the empty body cavity and then sets the sleeve in a sink of rinse water.
Another team takes it from there. They stretch it out on a marble-topped table and use a meat cleaver to cut it into fist-sized chunks.
Volunteers sell the m
eat in plastic bags, ten dollars a pound. The other parts go to an artisan in Colorado who will freeze-dry the heads to sell as novelties. The rattles will become key chains and such. The skin he tans and uses for hatbands and belts and wallets. The leather is delicate, grained with scales the shape of sunflower seeds, and far less practical than the kind made from the hides of cattle. It is only the snake’s reputation as a killer that creates a demand for its body parts.
Similarly, people eat rattlesnake meat because the creature has such a glamour about it, such a reputation for dealing death. The meat is expensive and not especially easy to get, yet it attracts people who would not care for other high-priced foods—snails, for example, or ostrich.
I myself have eaten rattlesnake. I bought a couple of pounds at the Waynoka roundup. A rattlesnake hunter from Texas told me the best way to cook rattlesnake meat is to brush it with lemon and butter and grill it, though people more commonly bread it and panfry it. This enthusiastic snake-eater said the taste had “a wild richness.” An acquaintance who grew up in Waynoka told me how he had been “uninvited” to a neighbor’s barbecue after he announced his intention to bring rattlesnake. This gentleman described the taste as resembling that of breast of chicken, but I put little stock in this claim, since I have heard every meat from frog to alligator similarly described. I have eaten frog, alligator, and a number of other supposed chicken substitutes, and none of them impressed me as particularly chicken-like.
Following the Texan’s recipe, I basted the rattlesnake meat and put it on the grill. Thirty seconds later each chunk of meat had shriveled to the size of a silver dollar and was the texture of a steel-belted radial.