As the poet Ofelia Zepeda wrote, “Tucson is a linguistic alternative.” She explains in one of her poems that the Tohono O’Odom word “Cuk Son” means “place by Black Mountains.” “Cuk Do ag” means “Black Mountains,” the name for the Tucson Mountains.
I rode horseback in those days. The view of the land from horseback is a high and wide expanse, good for distances but not so good for small things on the ground. I was able to spy deer antlers and desert tortoise shells from the high vantage of the saddle, and I’d stop the horse to pick them up. Occasionally I’d stop and dismount when I spied a turquoise rock or other interesting rocks, and walk alongside the horse to pick them up.
On horseback I traveled farther into the wilderness than I do now when I walk the trail. I haven’t found any tortoise shells or antlers on the walks but I do see deer now and then, and on rare occasions live tortoises. In the past thirty years the bulldozers and urban sprawl of Tucson have destroyed hundreds of square miles of pristine desert habitat and left the desert tortoises in danger of extinction along with the Gila monster lizards and spotted owls.
The old ranch house and the sheds and outbuildings are home to pack rats and deer mice accompanied by the gopher snakes, racer snakes and rattlesnakes that eat them. So in the beginning, I got to know the snakes and pack rats because we were neighbors. I began to keep notes about my encounters.
Ca’cazni is the Comcaac or Seri name for rattlers. Onomatopoeia for the sound of the rattle — it begins to rattle with slow “ca-ca-” but breaks into a buzzing rattle, thus the “z” and “ne” sounds.
The Raramuri, the Tarahumara Indians of the Sierra Madre in Chihuahua, use rattlesnake venom to treat cancer tumors. Snake oil has many medicinal uses, and the pejorative meaning for fraud is because a snake oil salesman called Rattlesnake King Stanley, at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, was arrested for fraud. He claimed to have lived among the Hopi people and to have killed and processed hundreds of snakes. But the oil in the bottles contained no rattlesnake oil, only mineral oil, turpentine, red pepper and camphor.
Steep banks of violet blue cumulus drift over the southwest horizon, off the Gulf of California; later in the morning, the rattlesnakes come out in anticipation of the rain. The light is pearly blue and cool enough for the snakes to await the rain. They favor spots near sources of water or shade, so it is easy to anticipate where they may be. In my yard one rattlesnake sits next to a ceramic bowl and its twin curls up in the rainwater drainpipe nearby. They lie in wait for little birds and rodents.
When I first came to this old ranch house there were the remains of a mesquite log corral below the hill, and I later repaired it so I could keep a horse. A big black and white Western diamondback rattlesnake lived near the old corral; what interested me at once was its calm demeanor. No coiling or rattling when we met, the snake made me feel welcome here. He knew I was a friend of snakes. I was careful to watch for him around the hay barn where he got fat on pack rats. If I found the big snake in the shade of the corral fence when I was making repairs, he patiently tolerated a gentle lift in the bowl of the shovel to a more out of the way place in the shade.
I called him “Baby” as a joke because it was an unlikely name for a rattler four feet long and about five inches in diameter. He was a grandfather snake not a baby. He kept me company for my first two summers in Tucson, but after the summer of 1980 when I was away in New Mexico much of the time, he left. The black and white color of the snake was dazzling and unusual, and I always hoped I might see another rattler like him, but more than thirty years later, I have not. Maybe the old snake was a messenger of welcome and more supernatural than I realized at the time.
Other big rattlesnakes live near the old corral but these snakes are shades of light brown and beige, the usual colors for snakes in this area; the only black and white they had were the rings of stripes on their tails by the rattles. I found an Arizona black rattlesnake under a piece of plywood on my driveway, but he was small and completely black with no white markings. I haven’t seen him again, but I always remember to watch out for him on the driveway, especially at night.
I was seven years old and still under the influence of my father the snake-killer, when I shot and killed a yearling rattler with my single shot.22 rifle. It was early September and the poor snake was looking for a place to hibernate when it coiled on the step to my grandparents’ house. But I knew in a matter of minutes my ninety year old great grandmother would come from her house to spend the night and she would walk up those steps.
I still regret the summer after my divorce from John Silko in 1979 because I allowed the neighbor boys to kill the big dusty red rattler on the west side of the house. I tried to persuade the big rattlesnake to relocate by splashing buckets of cold water on him three times. My younger son Caz was seven at the time and I was afraid he’d get bitten. But after that day, I promised myself to protect the rattlesnakes.
Yet my ignorance and carelessness have killed a number of rattlesnakes. Ordinary chicken wire I discarded became the death snare for a fine three foot long rattler on the west slope of the hill below my house. The snake was able to get its head and neck through the oval opening but when the fatter part of it could not fit and the snake attempted to back out, the wire snagged its scales so it was trapped and died terribly.
I was able to save a big beautiful Sonoran gopher snake that became trapped while climbing through the chicken wire enclosure around the back patio. I got rid of all the chicken wire; hardware cloth with its tiny mesh is superior in every way to chicken wire and does far less harm to reptiles.
Monofilament nylon netting used to protect trees from birds is even worse than chicken wire for reptiles. The threads of monofilament nylon easily entangle a lizard’s toes and feet and as it struggles to get free, its delicate scales only become more entangled.
The iridescent sky blue lizards that live on the roof and walls of my house are usually combative if they fall into human hands, but the fat sky blue lizard I found tangled in the nylon netting remained calm as I snipped away the netting with my kitchen shears. Somehow the lizard understood I meant no harm; similarly I’ve heard cowboys describe mule deer entangled in barbed wire that allowed the cowboys to cut them free without a struggle.
After I freed the sky lizard, I removed that wretched nylon bird netting from the patio and was about to drop it into the trash when I noticed horse damage on a young mesquite tree in my front yard, so carelessly I tossed the netting over the tree and forgot about it. A few months passed. Then early one morning just at dawn I heard my dogs barking like maniacs and when I went outside I found a big rattlesnake caught in that piece of bird netting.
The snake was terribly snagged with the nylon filaments cutting deeply into his body at the thickest point, about ten inches from his head which moved freely while his middle remained trapped. He was about thirty inches long and as big around as my wrist, but as soon as I called off the dogs, the snake stopped rattling. It was early July. The sun was rising and in only a few hours the trapped snake would die from the heat. I had to save his life but I didn’t know how I was going to do it because I was alone and the nearest neighbor a half mile away. I didn’t have much time. The sun was up and felt warmer by the minute.
The snake didn’t want dogs near him but he didn’t seem to mind me, not even when I squatted down and slowly and very carefully examined how badly he was trapped. It was bad. As the snake struggled to free itself, it had only pulled the netting tighter, until the filaments drew blood on the tender skin between the scales. I had to act fast. I ran indoors and found a pair of tin shears, about fifteen inches long, handles and blades included. No matter how I did it, I was going to have to put both hands within easy striking range of the head and upper body that was not entangled and moved freely. The big snake was calm so far, but I’d have to press the tips of the steel blades firmly against the snake’s body in order to reach the nylon filaments jammed under the scales. What would the snake do then?