When I turned on the lights I saw a small rattlesnake, no more than ten or twelve inches long, but I knew right away this was an adult; its body wasn’t shaped like a baby snake. Its proportions were smaller than those of a diamondback; its head was small and its rattles were small so the sound wasn’t nearly as loud.
What a beautiful rattler it was — instead of the familiar diamondback pattern this snake had a wide banded pattern in maroon brown on gray. The banded pattern and the snake’s small size meant it was a banded rock rattler, a rare species. It was no coincidence that the mesquite bean pods on the ground and the pattern of the snake were indistinguishable from one another; the camouflage enables the snake to prey on the rodents that eat the pods.
I recalled the nights the dog insisted there was a snake indoors with her and I searched and found nothing; but since I was looking for a big diamondback I easily might have overlooked the small snake.
CHAPTER 18
I tried to keep working on the novel Blue Sevens in August, but it was difficult. On the eleventh of the month I thought of my mother.
I thought of her on the morning of September 11, 2001 as I was getting up; a few minutes later the planes hit the World Trade Center.
I lost my mother on July 11, and two months later, I lost my country.
I was not able to write about this period of my life for a long time, and then when I did, I chose to write fiction.
The Tucson TV weatherman said 2002 is the driest year since European record keeping began here. It is now early July and the ground is so dry that it shrinks, and the plastic pipe of the water line is cast up and out of the baked earth. Even the indigenous plants and trees begin to die off — the smallest, the oldest and the sickest die first.
The big rattlesnakes don’t even bother to come out — no point in wasting energy when there’s nothing there to eat — the rodents and birds are scarce. The smaller rattlers have to come out and take a chance; they don’t have the reserves so they can’t sit out the drought like the big snakes can.
I’ve had to perform two rattlesnake rescues this season. One of the three small snakes that live on the west side of the house managed to fall into the old ranch cistern which is half filled with dirt. He’d been trapped in there long enough to shed a skin. The rainwater kept him alive. On the cold nights of early spring the snake took shelter under a tin garbage can lid that was covered by a sheet of old plywood. I felt I had to free the snake but I wasn’t sure how to do it yet. The snake appeared to be o.k. but hungry, so after sundown I carefully dropped the snake two live white mice intended for the indoor rattlesnake. The rattler in the cistern ate both mice at once.
Because the cistern belonged to me, I felt obligated to free the snake. I saw it try to climb the concrete walls so I gave it some 2×4s to climb out, but rattlers aren’t agile climbers. I thought about putting the ladder down in the old cistern and going in after the snake with my parrot net. But I realized the ladder bumping around would only upset the snake. Instead I duct taped the handle of a dust mop to the handle of my parrot net to give me the length I needed so I could reach down into the cistern and gently scoop the rattler out.
At first the snake didn’t want to go into the parrot net and tried to hide under the plywood. He didn’t like the disturbance and coiled but didn’t rattle — maybe because he recognized me from the west doorstep where we meet from time to time. I moved very slowly and gently with the parrot net made of soft fabric; I tried to carefully scoop the snake into the net but it was fearful and shrank away.
On my second attempt the snake made a half-hearted strike at the net but then he seemed to decide it wasn’t going to kill him if it hadn’t already; or he understood I meant no harm. He might have recognized my scent from the white mice I fed him earlier. The snake remained in his coil, but he was calm now and did not strike or move away from the net, and then he went into the net and I made a twist in the top so he couldn’t escape. I lifted the snake in the net out of the cistern and left the net on the ground with the top open near the entrance to the snake den under my house. He stayed in the net for a while and later when I checked on him he was cautiously crawling out, headed for the snake pipe entrance under the house.
I had a pipe installed under the kitchen floor out the west wall of the house to allow the snakes to get in and out from under the house. One time during a remodeling project, the workmen accidentally buried the pipe entrance with construction dirt and debris. Later I noticed the blocked entrance but I forgot to get a shovel and fix it because it is on the west side of the house where I seldom go.
There was an alternate entry place for the snakes on the east side but during the summer I covered this entryway with a piece of window screen to keep the squirrels out from under my house. As the first cool weather arrived in October, right after dark I heard an eerie buzzing and rattling sound outside that I’d never heard before.
I went to the window and listened; I could make out the sound of seven or eight rattlesnakes all buzzing and rattling in unison on the west side of the house in front of the blocked snake pipe.
The next morning I got a phone call from my poet-astrologer friend, Joy Harjo. She said, “I don’t know if you’ll be able to make anything out of this — but I have a message for you. Last night I had a dream and in it, this giant rattlesnake kept following me; I recognized him as Grandfather Rattler. When I asked him what he wanted, he said he had a message for Leslie. Tell her she owes me a plug of tobacco and a screen.” Joy asked if any of it made any sense. Yes, I told her, the message did make sense.
I owed the plug of tobacco to the snakes because I allowed the snake pipe entrance under the house to be blocked. The “screen” referred to the piece of window screen that blocked the east entrance under the house; but the word “screen” also referred to the large canvas painting I’d been working on.
Usually in the fall, I painted a snake image of some kind as I did in 1986 with the Stone Avenue mural which featured a giant messenger rattlesnake with human skulls in its belly. But I decided I should do something different, and I sketched a regal horned lizard on a piece of unstretched canvas eight feet long and four feet high. But the painting was a failure; I just couldn’t seem to get into the right rhythm with the lizard.
After Joy’s phone call, I went back to the canvas and painted out the horned lizard with white paint. I worked all November and December to paint a giant snake with blue macaw rain clouds above it and these words:
Every Fall I painted a snake. This year when I painted a lizard instead, Old Grandfather Rattlesnake sent me a message in a dream.
When I was a child, the old-time people used to sprinkle corn meal and pollen in the circles the snakes made just as they used to sprinkle corn meal and pollen in the tracks of mountain lions.
The Western diamondbacks here are light colored to blend in with the pale volcanic ash that forms the thin topsoil in the Tucson Mountains. Herpetologists call the white snakes “albinistic” because they are white but are not true albinos. The albinistic rattlers have dark eyes and black and white stripes on their tails.
The big white rattler that lives in the back yard found an empty clay pot that was sitting upright next to the water tub where the wild creatures come to drink. Somehow the big white snake managed to crawl into the empty clay pot and arranged his bulk so that he could hide down with just his head peeping over the rim of the pot, where he could strike a dove drinking water from the tub. The dogs noticed him first. And a good thing they did. I probably would have stood right next to the snake in the pottery bowl and not even have seen it and then had a good scare when I did finally notice it.