He stopped occasionally to listen and watch birds and to sip some drops from his bottle. Much of what he was walking through was sand, red clay, and shale, with low cactuses and occasional desert flowers growing here and there. He found four small arroyos where there was a little shade and greener growth, and he came upon two caves where he found what he took to be javelina spore, but it was not fresh and he did not see any javelinas.
He gave up his search for the javelinas after a while and sat down to think about the rattlers before hunting them. It was well into July, so it would be a little tricky, though not as bad as August. In August, the snake shed his skin; he was blind then, and he would strike out at anything that moved, without any kind of warning. He was a little skittery in July, so you would need a good stick. He found one about four feet long, broke the twigs off it, and waved it a little for feel. Then he began looking for the snakes.
He poked the stick around the bases of cactuses. When he came to places where the shale was a little elevated, he circled them, checking for sunny resting places. After about a half-hour, he found his first one. It was good size, about five feet long he guessed, and good and fat. It lay flat, strung out from tail rattles to a point about eight inches from its broad head, where there was a bend in it, a little slack it used when it raised up some to check things. Its head was flat on the rock, its eyes half open and a little glazed. The piece of red shale it was on was about two feet off the ground; it protruded in a shelf out from a configuration of shale that was about ten feet in diameter. He was standing off to the side of it. “Good afternoon,” he said to himself and moved slowly away and to the left to get a look at what was behind it.
Though the rock to the rear of the snake’s tail was in shade, it seemed darker than it should be there, and he suspected that there was an opening between rocks where the snake, if he startled it, could go. He would not want to mess with it if it got in there. He moved slowly, a little more to his left, aiming to come close to getting between the sun and the snake. When he had moved far enough back and to the side, he was about thirty feet from the snake, a little to the left of its head. He raised both of his hands, linking his fingers together, and moved them slowly into the path of the sun. He was humming softly, a kind of cricket whistle, disjointed and without any clear rhythm. When his hands got in the sun’s way, they threw a shadow on the ground about six feet from the overhang on which the snake rested.
He altered his fingers slightly, forming the shape of a small rodent on the ground. He tested it by rippling his fingers slightly; the shadow undulated like some injured thing. He bent quickly to the left, his hands still in the air, and then moved back again. For a moment he had thrown a shadow across the snake’s head. The snake’s head lifted in a quick fluid gesture, its eyes snapping open. For a full two minutes, it looked slowly around, shifting its body slightly. Then it lowered its head to the same place on the rock, but its eyes remained open.
Bob White began to move the shadow slowly back and forth on the ground. It was not in clear sight of the snake, but it must have done something to the temperature of the air or to the small insects it passed over or to the attitude of the few places where there was grass, because the snake began to inch its way slowly forward toward the edge of the shale ledge. In ten minutes it got there, and when Bob White saw that it was getting close, he stopped the movement of the shadow and began to twitch it slightly at intervals of about five seconds. The snake looked at the shadow intently. After twitching the shadow for a while, he began to edge it away from the snake slowly, with little flutters and jerks. The snake stayed where it was, but when the shadow was about eight feet away from it, it dropped its head over the end of the ledge and began to slide off the shale, curling to other pieces of shale below it, until all of its body was on the sandy ground.
It had added twists to itself, and it began to glide slowly over the sand, head slightly erect now, the small trough where its body had been leaving a shallow trail behind it.
When Bob White had the shadow about ten feet from where he stood, he stopped it, making it quiver in place.
About six feet from the shadow the snake stopped moving, then began to edge forward again to reach striking distance. When he thought he had the snake close enough to him, out in the open enough, he pulled his hands out of the sun’s path. The snake stopped moving immediately and was poised, as still as a piece of twisted pipe. He left it there, and walked quickly back and got the gunny sack and the stick. When he moved, the snake jerked its head in his direction and began to rattle. He returned to where he had been, held the gunny sack in his left hand, and began to rap with the stick on the ground in front of him.
“I’ve got you now, old salt,” he said aloud, and then he yelled out, “Hoo!” and rapped the stick sharply against a piece of shale. The snake jerked his head up higher and began to rattle more furiously, and Bob White moved in. He tapped the tip of the stick between the snake and the opening of the gunny sack in his hand. When he saw the snake tighten its body, shortening it like a compressed spring, he stopped moving the stick toward the sack and just tapped it in place on the ground. The snake was now about three feet from the stick, and he moved the gunny sack in closer. When the snake struck, he jerked the stick away, and at the same time he thrust the gunny sack toward it. The snake landed in the sack up to the midpoint of its body. Bob White lifted the sack, and the snake fell into the bottom of it, twisted and turned for a moment, and then was still.
By the time he had gotten two more snakes into the sack, the sun was high above him and it was very hot. He found a shaded place and drank what water remained in his small bottle. Then he untied the piece of twine from the mouth of the sack and let it rest on the ground. He found a few good-sized stones and took his stick and prodded the snakes until they began to emerge from the sack. He killed each one by dropping a stone on its head. Then he cut off the heads and the rattles, throwing the heads into the desert and putting the rattles in his pocket. When he had done that, he took out his knife again and skinned the snakes on a rock. He put the skins, rolled into loose coils, into small plastic sandwich bags that he took from his back pocket. From the fold of bags, he extracted three larger ones and put the snake meat into them. Then he packed the bags into a corner of the gunny sack and folded it into a square. He put the sack in the shade and sat on a rock, smoking and looking at the few flowers around him and listening to the birds. The smoke curled up from his lobster-claw pipe, gathering in a thin cloud in the still air above his head. After a while he got up, knocked his pipe empty against a rock, fetched the bag from the shade, and set off in the same zigzag manner he had used to get where he was, back by a different route toward the dirt-road spur and the lower foothills.
THERE WAS A HINT THAT SOMETHING MIGHT MATERIALIZE when they reached the ninth hole, a short par three with a tee that was elevated so that one hit considerably downhill to the green. Because of the shortness of the hole (about a hundred and sixty yards) the green had been made small, and there were traps guarding it on all sides.
“Farthest from the pin buys lunch?” Steve said, as they were climbing out of their carts. Frankie had loosened up some as they played the front nine. He was not as good as the other two, but he was close enough in skill to keep himself in things, and he seemed pleased there was someone playing with them whom he was better than. Steve and Lou were playing about even, near par. Frankie was four over, but he had missed three short putts, rimming the cup. Allen was five over and had dropped three long putts to save pars.