“Close the vents, crank this buggy up to warp speed, ” Bobby said, “and
take us for a ride on the rattlesnake road.” Roosevelt said, “My mama
always says, Patience pays.”
“The snakes aren’t here because we are, ” I said. “They don’t care about
us. They aren’t blocking us. We just happened to come through here at
the wrong time. They’ll move on, probably sooner than later.”
Bobby patted my shoulder. “Roosevelt’s mom is a lot more succinct than
you are, dude.” Every snake that rose into sentry position from the
churning host immediately focused its attention on us. Depending on the
angle at which the headlamps caught them, their eyes brightened and
flared red or silver, less often green, like small jewels.
I assumed that the light drew their interest. Desert rattlers, like most
snakes, are nearly as deaf as dirt. Their vision is good, especially at
night, when their slit-shaped pupils dilate to expose more of their
sensitive retinas. Their sense of smell may not be as powerful as that
of a dog, since they’re seldom called upon to track down escaped
prisoners or to sniff out dope in smugglers’ luggage, however, in
addition to a good nose, a snake has a second organ of smelljacobson’s
organ, consisting of two pouches lined with sensory tissue located in the
roof of the mouth. That’s why a serpent’s forked tongue flicks
ceaselessly, It licks microscopic particles of odor from the air,
conveying these clusters of molecules to the pouches in its mouth, to
savor and analyze them.
Now these rattlers were busily licking the air for our scents to
determine if suitably delicious prey might be found behind the
headlights.
I’ve learned a great deal about desert rattlesnakes, with which I share
the earlier and warmerpart of the night. In spite of their evil
appearance, they possess a compelling beauty.
Weird became weirder when one of the weaving sentries abruptly reared
back and struck at another that had risen beside it. The bitten rattler
bit back, the two coiled around each other and then dropped to the
pavement. The flexuous swarm closed over them, and for a minute, turmoil
swept through the braided multitude, which writhe not languorously, as
before, but in a frenzy, as supple and quick as lashing whips, twisting
and coiling excitedly, as though the urge to bite their own had spread
beyond the angry pair we’d seen strike each other, briefly sparking
civil war within the colony.
As the slithery horde grew calmer again, Sasha said, “Do snakes usually
bite one another? ”
“Probably not, ” I said.
“Wouldn’t think they’d be vulnerable to their own venom, ” said
Roosevelt, returning the ice pack to his left eye.
“Well, ” Bobby said, “if we’re ever condemned to live through high
school again, maybe we can make a science project out of that question.
” Again, one of the rearing rattlers, weaving above the rest and licking
the air for prey, struck at another of the sentries, and then a third
grew agitated enough to strike the first. The trio raveled down into the
swarm, and another siege of spastic thrashing whipped through the
undulant masses.
“It’s the birds again, ” I said. “The coyotes.”
“The folks at the Stanwyks’, ” Roosevelt added.
“Psychological implosion, ” Sasha said.
“I don’t suppose a snake has much of a psyche to be logical about, ”
Bobby said, “but yeah, it sure looks like part of the same phenomenon.”
“They’re moving, ” Roosevelt noted.
Indeed, the squirming legions were, so to speak, on the march.
They began to move across the two-lane blacktop, across the narrow dirt
shoulder, vanishing into the tall grass and wildflowers to the right of
the highway.
The complete procession, however, consisted of more than the eighty or
one hundred specimens that we had been watching. As scores of snakes
disappeared into the grass beyond the right-hand shoulder, scores of
others appeared out of the field to the left of Haddenbeck Road, as if
they were pouring out of a perpetual-motion, snake-making machine
Perhaps three or four hundred rattlers, increasingly quarrelsome and
agitated, crossed into the southern wilds before the blacktop was clear
at last. When they were gone, when not a single wriggling form remained