The Red Hourglass

by Gordon Grice

  “They look like little vampire bats,” my wife, Tracy, said. She was right. I tied one to a string and caused it to fly around the backyard while I made squeaking noises. My son, who had just turned one, thought it was funny, but Tracy gave me one of her patented see-what-I-have-to-put-up-with looks. Then she put some chicken on to grill.

  “Surely you’re not giving up on the snake yet?” I said.

  “There’s no meat on your bats,” she said. She was right again. Each little bat consisted of many tiny ribs. Between any two ribs there was about enough meat to make a mouse need a toothpick.

  Nevertheless, I set about eating. The taste wasn’t bad—something like gamey, dark turkey meat, and, to be honest, a little like chicken—but I nearly starved trying to get the meat off the bone. After the meal, I phoned the Texan.

  “What sort of scam are you trying to run?” I asked him tactfully.

  “It always worked for me,” he said, as if he’d done nothing wrong.

  Despite my disappointment with my own culinary skills, eating the rattlesnake gave me a deep satisfaction. The taste was not the point, just as a human cannibal’s point in eating his enemy’s heart is not gustatory pleasure. It is the devouring of death that matters. It is a communion.

  Rattlesnakes live in a world of vibration and scent and subtleties of heat. Dogs live in a world that’s largely scent and high sound. Somewhere in that system of senses beyond our experience, a dialogue of hatred transpires.

  When I was a child my grandparents had a German shepherd. I saw her one day moping around the porch, her neck swollen as if with a goiter. My grandmother told me she must have fought a rattlesnake. That’s the first I knew of the ancestral feud.

  One morning our own dog, a miniature bloodhound, lay under the air conditioner. He had arranged straw and an old blanket into a sow’s nest in the dirt, as if he expected to be laid up awhile. He growled when anyone approached. He had never growled at us that way before, with that tone of serious business. He lay there for two days, and the bowls of milk and water we set at a safe distance went untouched. They were cold, drizzling days, and the air on his side of the house smelled like soggy toast and sickness. My mother spoke to us gently, making implications I didn’t want to hear.

  On the third morning he was up and surly, snapping at the other dogs, licking weakly at a pan of gelid milk. Loose skin sagged at his throat, the only remnant of the throat-constricting bloat I had never quite glimpsed. I had only heard my father tell my mother about it.

  I assumed the dogs must have been taken by surprise, but that’s not how it works. Dogs like to hunt rattlesnakes. They detect the scent easily. There’s a confrontation—even cowardly dogs seem to lose all sense in their hatred of the rattlesnake. As the snake becomes more agitated, so does the dog. I suspect the sound produced by the snake’s rattle, which affects people so profoundly, does the same to dogs. Or maybe it’s the stink of the rattler. Some claim the smell can make a human dizzy.

  If a dog gets his jaws around a rattler, the rattler is doomed: the dog whips its head side to side, snapping the snake’s spine, and doesn’t stop until the snake lies in pieces. (Alligators kill rattlesnakes by the same method, which they use only on venomous snakes—the others they simply swallow.)

  Dogs lead with their snouts, so they almost always get bitten somewhere on the front end. Some die of the bite, though in general dogs are fairly resistant. Some dogs hunt a rattlesnake, once scented, to the exclusion of everything else. One farmer claimed he could tell from a distance when his dog tangled with a rattlesnake by its tone of voice.

  Dogs become more efficient at hunting rattlers through experience, and experience involves bites. The canines develop immunity to the venom, and some old dogs hardly notice another rattler bite. The first bite makes the dog, which innately dislikes rattlers, hate and actively hunt them. Maybe the nasty near-death experience amplifies their hatred, or maybe they somehow know they’ve been immunized and can indulge their passion freely.

  Estimates of the rattler’s size ranged from eighteen inches to four feet. Personally, I put it near the smaller end. The question is not trivial. My boots are thirteen inches high—I measured them afterwards—and knowing the snake’s length would theoretically have allowed me to judge how close I could get, because rattlesnakes are said to have a strike less than half a body-length. As it was, I chose to keep a good distance, and my wife said later that while I was at work with the shovel, I formed an arch like a pole vaulter in midleap.

  We were inside the trailer house when the dog raised the alarm. Jody, my brother-in-law, opened the front door to investigate. I was sitting at the kitchen table in front of the swamp cooler with a glass of iced tea and couldn’t see outside, but I didn’t have to. I heard the buzz.

  “Another one,” Jody said. “Well, hell.”

  “He hates those rattlers,” Corey said.

  I asked if she thought her husband would take offense at an offer of help. She thought he’d be grateful.

  I asked Jody for a shovel. He brought one for himself as well. Everyone else stayed in the trailer.

  The prairie rattler was a good twenty feet from the door, but its buzzing was audible over the dog’s barking. The dog, a young chow, worked a circle just beyond striking range. The snake coiled back and back on itself, its head leveled for a strike, its tail shivering too fast to be visible.

  Jody and I approached from opposite sides. The dog fell in behind me and kept barking. No matter which way the snake and I moved, the dog’s nose remained pointed to the true-north of the rattler.

  I planted the shovel blade in front of the snake. Sometimes a rattler will stand still when faced with a shovel blade. If the metal is cold, it confuses him—he senses it as something moving but too cool to be alive. I know a man who collects live specimens by employing this fact. He puts a shovel in front of the snake, and while it pauses to “look” with its heat sensors, he walks up behind the rattler and picks it up by the back of the head.

  But this day was well over a hundred degrees, and I guess nothing read “cold.” The rattler lunged up the shovel blade, and kept trying to climb it as I wagged it from side to side. It was zigzagging, but its movements looked like those of rapid water. It could have climbed the shovel easily if I’d held it still. Instead, I flicked the snake back and slammed the blade down on it. The stroke wasn’t clean, but it was the best I could do with a rattler stirred to such speed. The rattler rolled over twice around the wound, which cut across two of its coils. I saw the white flash of its belly, then the dusty gold and chocolate of its back, then both again in quick succession. The buzzing didn’t stop.

  All that movement happened in a second or so. I planted another blow, and this time, with the snake wounded, my aim was better, the blow severing the head cleanly. The buzzing stopped, then started again in a muted way, as if the tail had plunged under water. The body whipped once, then straightened out; the muscles still moved, but forward, in a sort of peristalsis. I drove the shovel blade into the ground with my boot to make the decapitation sure. The buzzing gave a few stops and starts—and then the tail stilled. The dog leaped forward, bit the snake near the middle, and slung the body side to side.

  The dog carried the body off somewhere. I took the rattle. Jody buried the head to prevent anyone’s stepping on a fang.

  That was the third rattler they’d seen around the trailer. A couple of days after we killed it, Jody and I walked through the tousled grass behind the trailer, talking out the problem.

  A small frame house had stood in what was now the front yard. The house had stood empty for twenty years before Jody had had it bulldozed into its own cellar. It was completely invisible under the yard, which Jody and I had tilled and planted with grass seed. Occasionally as we tilled we found an old shingle or a shard of window glass. The only outbuilding left was a barn. There had been no cellar to push the barn into; the workers had simply knocked it over. It lay in untidy piles in what Jody and his family had desig
nated the backyard, its wood weathered past any trace of paint. Yellow grass jutted between the boards. Three parched elms, leaning with the course of fifty years’ wind, stood around the pile. They were the only trees within eyes’ reach.

  The fallen barn was clearly the source of the snake problem. It was good shelter, inaccessible to hawks and dogs. I poked around it. In places the dirt gave way beneath my boots; the bulldozer had leveled the ground but left hollows just beneath the surface. Once I dropped about a foot. The crater I had discovered was a sort of cave extending at least six feet to the side. I scrambled out, fearing the cave was a rattlesnake den. There was a jumble of pipes in it that neither of us could explain, and a mass of concrete that must have been part of the old house’s foundation, but no sign of rattlesnake.

  I went farther into the rubble. Jody’s two-year-old son followed me. When I realized he had come along, I said, “Go back to the house—there may be snakes in here.” I hadn’t finished my sentence before I heard a buzz like the shivering of icy leaves.

  “Get back,” I said to the boy, in a tone I hoped would discourage any questions.

  “Why?” he said.

  Jody came running. He had heard the buzz. He scooped up the boy and ran him to the trailer.

  “Bring a shovel when you come back,” I said.

  So far I hadn’t seen the rattler—I had only heard it. Now the buzzing stopped and I glimpsed movement. A fallen outer wall of the barn lay six feet to my right, and a thin snake was fleeing along its siding, smooth as oiled rope through a pulley. Its hide had the faded look of the prairie rattler, the yellow of old documents patterned with the brown of old saddle leather. Its head slipped into a hole in the wood, and the body glided after it without any break in its rhythm.

  I had lost time seeing to the boy. My chances of killing the snake were slim. I saw one opportunity: the board the snake had slipped under looked loose. I kicked it. The bent nails that held it creaked and the board flew off.

  The snake was holding the same straight line it had been following on top of the wall. A man who drives a ditcher once told me of following a rattler in a new ditch. The man had dug the first pass and needed to make a second pass to deepen the ditch. He saw the snake crawl into the ditch behind him on the first pass; when he turned around to make the second pass, the snake fled along the ditch for dozens of yards before being flung by the ditcher. It could have saved itself by crawling out of the ditch. They are like water: path of least resistance. They don’t see things schematically, from above, as we erect primates do.

  My snake was already halfway under another board. Its rear half was exposed. If I had had a shovel, I could have delivered a deathblow with little danger to myself. As it was, my only chance of killing it was to grab the thing in the second before it made cover. The only safe way to hold a rattler is by the back of its head, but if I could grab this one by the tail and throw it onto open ground, I might be able to block its escape until a weapon came to hand.

  I reached for it—and glimpsed something disturbing. I hesitated, and the snake escaped.

  I had glimpsed a tangle of spiderweb. It glimmered in the shadow of a board as the snake brushed by. I had seen only that glimmer, but it was enough to suggest the shape. It was a black widow’s web.

  Jody returned with a pair of shovels. “How about a jar?” I said.

  “You’re not going to fit that snake in a jar,” he said.

  After I had explained the new development, Jody procured a Miracle Whip jar. I looked around thoroughly to make sure no snakes were likely to bite me while I knelt over the widow’s web. The web ran in a sloppy weave along a board. Beneath it I saw the glinting black shell and pincers of a carabid beetle; it must have been a massive specimen, at least two inches long. The other insect husks, covered in mold and old web, were harder to identify.

  The web twisted into a kind of funnel which angled under the board. Because of the turmoil the snake and I had produced, the spider was almost certain to be hiding in its funnellike retreat. I turned the board and slapped the jar over the funnel. A flick of a twig knocked the spider into the jar.

  It was a mature female. Despite its dirty surroundings, it gleamed a clean black. I put the lid on the jar. The widow scratched frantically at the glass, but couldn’t climb it.

  In the widow’s web hung a marble-sized ball of silk, its texture like linen. It was an egg sac, and in the side of it was a pinpoint hole through which the spiderlings had already escaped. The egg sac suggested the possibility that young widows might be scattered throughout the woodpile. I stood and thought about the situation while Jody went for the dog. I hated to let the snake go; it was too close to the trailer for safety. I also hated the idea of digging through the wood; I’d be in constant danger from black widows and rattlers both. The black widow has a more dangerous venom than any rattlesnake ounce-for-ounce, but the rattler deals in greater volume. Both venoms are less dangerous to dogs than to humans.

  Jody brought the red-blond chow from her pen. Her black ears had serrated edges where they had been fly-bitten. She barked wildly at the woodpile. She had caught the snake’s scent. I could smell it too, a clammy, nauseous taint in the air. She went to a spot in the middle of the fallen wall and tried to dig, her claws rebounding from the wood. She didn’t make a dent, but she kept digging. I came over to stand on the spot; she backed off to let me have my turn. I stomped on the boards. After five or six tries, my boot broke through to dirt. I stepped away quickly. The dog plunged in, weaseling through the hole I had made and digging at the ground. Dirt flew out along her red flanks. Her barks turned to growls. She had something.

  She came out of the hole tossing her head from side to side, the snake swinging in her mouth—but it wasn’t the snake. It was only his old skin.

  The next afternoon was 110 degrees. It was lousy weather for a snake hunt; no snake would be out in such heat. It would be deep beneath the old wood until dusk, pouring its excess heat into the cool dirt. But this was the only time I had, and I went at the pile with an axe Corey found for me. I meant to chop through the wood and stir something up.

  I brought the dog with me. She barked at the smell of the place and scratched at the hole where she’d dug out the old skin. She dug at the loose boards where I had seen the snake the night before. I worked with the axe, but it was dull. I didn’t get far before the heat wore me down. I stood in the hot wind with red wasps buzzing around my face and the dry grass hissing—it sounded a little like a rattler’s buzz, and I confess I had stopped in my chopping several times to make sure of the sound.

  I couldn’t do much more. It was time for drastic measures.

  The bulldozer returned to push the wood and its tangle of grass away from the trailer. It gouged a hollow near the old house’s grave, and then scraped the hollow again, pass after pass, and soon the hole was deep enough to hold the barn. The dozer left the land smooth, and where the old farmhouse and its outbuildings had stood for seventy years, there stood only a trailer house and a patch of newly sprouted grass.

  A couple of weeks after the bulldozing, a man from the county came to tell Jody and Corey to be on the lookout for snakes. The county workers were mowing the ditches of the dirt road near their house, and whatever wildlife lived in the ditch might show up at the trailer. But the family saw nothing unusual.

  Driving away from their place one hot evening, I spotted a rattler on the road, recently dead from a sharp wound, maybe the slash of a mower blade. Sun and rot had not yet made it swell. I took the head and the rattle.

  You’ve had nightmares like this. Everything is normal except for one detail, preposterously wrong, and no one else is there to notice that vulgar disproportion, that dangerous but unspoken violation. The young man was looking across a long stretch of ground at three horses watering at a trough. Two of them seemed themselves, and the third had an enormous head. The young man stared, trying to see things in some different way that would make some sense of the scene.

  He a
pproached the horses. He had worked with all of them, and they hardly stirred at his approach. The two buckskins drank, water rattling off their tongues. The big palomino mare turned her rich brown eyes on him, but they were no longer horse’s eyes. They were bulging and weeping blood. Her head was twice the size it should have been, and furrows of creased flesh showed where a halter should have been. Her breath was coming hard.

  The man touched the horse’s face. He should have felt the firm bone beneath the felt hide, but her muzzle was softer, like a bag of water. He ran his fingers into the furrows and found the straps of the halter buried there. He fumbled to unbuckle the halter, his every tug on the straps causing a catch in the mare’s breath. Finally he took out his knife and cut the halter free. The mare breathed easier and plodded to the trough.

  He’d seen the two punctures just above her nose. They told him everything: a patch of grass or weeds, a warning buzz, a young grazing horse too curious to heed it.

  Scientists think the rattle evolved as a way to warn off hoofed animals that might accidentally trample the snake. Horses seem to understand the message, at least when they’re older and experienced on open range. They usually shy from the sound.

  But there’s more to the story. 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. One deer was spotted jumping up and down on a rattler for half an hour. No other small animal gets this kind of treatment from the hoofed contingent. Why do large herbivores attack this particular snake? Maybe they, like some people, want to kill the snake while it’s in the open and the odds are good, somehow knowing they may meet it under worse circumstances another day if the snake escapes. The rattlesnake’s venom, a prime predatory asset, brings down its doom.