Land Snakes Alive !

A Coral Snake came to help RTGFKAR with the gardening yesterday. It was a little guy, no more than 13 or 14 inches in length and about as big around as a pencil. We watched it pass through the side yard and slither up the hill and gone. We locked Gus in the house while the snake was in the neighborhood because he'd have to poke it with his nose or paw at it; two not very good ideas. RTGFKAR got a couple of photos of the striped reptile, but I haven't been able to figure out how to attach them to the blog from my mailbox.

One summer when I was a young teen, I began a snake collection in an old chicken coop behind our house. I rigged a number of cages in there and set about finding "The Snakes of New Jersey." I caught so many garter and common water snakes that I let most of them go, keeping only the largest ones. My prize was a three foot Pine Snake that I'll tell you about a bit later and I had a few other snakes I just couldn't identify as our town library didn't have many books with snake pictures. I'm guessing now that they were probably varieties of Rat Snakes. I once spent a week trying to catch a Scarlet King Snake, which is a Coral Snake look-a-like. I knew where it hung out and I spotted it everyday, but I could never get close enough to pin it. Snakes can disappear faster than Houdini.

One of the crueler things I'd do - teenage boys are not the most sensitive of creatures - would be to take a water snake and drop it in front of one of our neighbor's barn cats. Water Snakes are bad tempered and will strike and bite at anything that messes with them. Barn cats, on the other hand, are just plain bad-assed. The snakes were never a match. What amazed me most was watching the cat go right up to the coiled snake's nose, provoking it, and then backing up faster than the snake could strike. The cats would usually play with the snakes awhile, sometimes killing them and sometimes just getting bored and wandering off. I thought it was a great show while it lasted.

My collection came to an abrupt end one early summer evening when one of my older sister's boyfriends, who had come to pick her up for a date, said "sure I'd like to see your snakes." Dumb cluck had to show me how brave he was by sticking his hand in a water snake's cage. He wasn't nearly as fast as a cat. His hand came out with the snake neatly attached, and then, to make matters worse, he tried to rip it off him with his other hand which made the bite go from puncture to real nasty. My father made me get rid of the snakes after that. He was afraid we would get sued. The guy never came back though, ever. A thing that didn't help much with relations between me and my sister. Apparently she liked the guy a lot. Go figure, I thought then. Who could like a guy who was that dumb.

I let all the snakes go except the Pine Snake. Our back yard terraced down to small creek and then rose into deep woods on the other side of the water. The land there was owned by the city and kept as a game preserve and water reserve. There were several small lakes back in there and it was in that "private property" that I spent most of my summer days when I wasn't practising my jump shot. I dumped all the cages down by the stream saving only the Pine Snake. Inspired by one of my many man-in-the wilderness books and magazines, I had decided that its black and white skin would make a nifty belt. Following the instructions in one of the books, I cut off the snake's head, slit it down the length of its belly and peeled its skin off. I nailed it to a board, salted it and leaned it against the garage wall to "cure". I then threw its remains into the brook where I watched in complete creeped out horror as the headless, skinless corpse swam away. I've been kinder to snakes ever since.