THIS BITES!

BY CRAIG CHILDS PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRUCE D. TAUBERT IT COULD HAVE BEEN ANY OF us bitten by a rattlesnake. We were all likely targets, working as guides and field instructors on the lower Colorado River, a place well populated by rattlesnakes. Picking up gear boxes and snapping out tarps, wearing river sandals and shorts, our bare flesh was always available. In some ways, I wished it had been me just to get it out of the way, and to answer my curiosity.

It was not me, though. Instead, it was a friend working a few miles upstream. He stepped on a rattlesnake in the night when the desert was warm and the only light came from an ambient, bluish glow among the stars. He was wearing his river sandals, and for an alarming half-second, a snake, some Crotalus species, thrust its knuckle-length fangs and 40 milligrams of venom into the exposed arch of his foot. The venom moved quickly into his cells and began at once digesting his foot and leg from the inside out. Within minutes, vascular breakdown began as his heartbeat carried poisons through his system. I did not hear from him at the time. All I heard shortly afterward was the sound of a boat passing alone in the night. News was shuttled up to my camp around tents and kitchen gear that a rescue was in progress, my friend being hurried downstream to the takeout. Five hours from the nearest hospital, I stood and listened to the silent, meandering river. I looked across the dome of the night, wondering what was happening on that departing boat, wondering and just barely wishing it had been me.

My friend did not die. There was not enough venom to stop his heart or plunge him into a coma, so he had remained conscious, gritting his teeth as he lay in the bottom of a boat heading for the takeout. Without a precise antivenin on hand, there was little to do but tie a loose strip of cloth above the bite and hope he did not die en route. After being carried off the river, and after a jostling ride across the desert to the town of Yuma, he lay in a hospital bed waiting for the poison to subside. Using antivenin is a dangerous procedure and can be fatal in itself, so the doctors decided just to watch him, making sure his throat did not seize. He had to wait it out.

There is more than death in a rattlesnake's bite. Its venom is a pharmacological menagerie of highly evolved proteins that, when isolated, prove to have numerous restorative powers. Its venom is known to treat some cancers. Its method of breaking down cell

walls using an atom of zinc to cut through the membrane like a sharp tooth is the same process by which cancers travel through the body. A drug made from rattlesnake venom reduces blood clotting and has been successfully administered to stroke victims, allowing them to regain physical and mental abilities within a matter of hours. A number of people who have intentionally injected doses of rattlesnake venom like daily vitamins have lived to an old age with few physical complaints, no colds or flu to speak of. But it is not something to trifle with. Dosage is a treacherous balance. Death is always present.

When I saw my friend a few days later, of course I wanted to hear every detail. He told me the bite itself had felt like a glow-ing-hot ice pick stabbed all the way to the bone. He described a burning sensation of poison entering his veins, how layers of pain seemed to unfold his very being. He said I could pull away the sheet covering him, and when I did I saw a foot and leg hideously swollen and black as coal. His skin, which looked like it should have exploded from such swelling, was grotesquely fireworked with burst blood vessels. I saw deflection in his eyes as he hid the constant wince he was feeling.

I smiled at him as I covered his disfigured leg with a sheet. I thought he was a better man for this. I said, "Snake medicine."

Knowing what I meant, knowing that he now had the physical presence of a rattlesnake inside of him, he nodded uncomfortably and repeated, "Snake medicine."

OVER THE YEARS, we all left the river and took different jobs, but some of us came back to this desert. We returned and met for long reunions in the wilderness. One night, a decade after we had worked together, three of us got a ride from a herpetologist 40 miles down a sandy twotrack into the desert. The plan was for the herpetologist to drop us off with enough water to walk our way out.

A rattlesnake appeared coiled in the headlights and the herpetologist slammed on his brakes. He flew out his door wielding a long pole with a net on the end. I do not know where the net came from. It simply sprang out of his arm. Without pause, he swept the net across the ground and in one fluid motion dove a single hand inside. He had a cord of muscle writhing in his hand. Like pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he lifted a Colorado Desert sidewinder, Cro-talus cerastes laterorepens, into the headlights. His thumb pressed behind the snake's skull, his forefinger shoveled under its jaw. The snake's body flipped back and coiled around his arm. It was not a long snake, less than 3 feet. But it was animated.I was not ready to see this. I had gotten out of the truck to look at a snake coiled on the ground, squat down in front of it maybe, watch its tongue snap at the air from a safe distance. But suddenly this man had a rattlesnake in his grasp and was look-ing into its eyes from a couple inches away. It was like looking straight into the steely gaze of Vishnu, the destroyer-god, some-thing you just don't do. I stepped back, almost stumbling on my own feet. I had known he was a reptile scientist, but I did not know about the net, or about the swiftness of his zeal.

"Oh," I said breathlessly, all I could say.

The snake was really pissed now. On the tip of its tail, an amber-colored shaker moved so fast, it whined. The rattle appeared to shimmer, a stack of dried, segmented scales vibrat-ing at about 60 flicks a second. It sent a single, loud message: Touch me not.

As if in a trance, with a fascinated smile on his face, the her-petologist muttered, "Ah, it's beautiful."

After a moment of reluctance and disbelief, I stepped closer. I was fixated, my heart thrumming under my shirt.

We were about to set off on a long walk in a country of rattlesnakes, and I felt uneasy about what was happening here. A rattlesnake bite in the Mexican wilderness would be dire. Helicopters would not come to our rescue. This seemed like bad snake medicine.

I do not know the magic of things, incantations or hexes, but I imagined it could not be good, angering a rattlesnake so much before a trek. As scientifically minded as I wish to be, I felt like we were broadcasting ill will to all sidewinders in the vicinity, adding to our risk. I thought to tell the herpetologist to put the snake down, but I could not. I was spellbound.

The herpetologist stepped back from me, finding a clear space between us where he released the sidewinder onto the ground with a thrust of his hands, not throwing it, but setting it down very swiftly. The snake flew across the ground like a rope of water racing away.

From there, the herpetologist left us. We three who remained navigated by stars as his taillights paled behind us. No one used a flashlight. Instead, we kept our eyes adjusted to the dark. The desert rolled out in front of us as we focused our eyes on the skim of Earth and sky in the distance, counting stars as they set. A rattle erupted from the ground between us, and suddenly we all woke, bodies snapped into action. We could not see the snake, but we knew exactly where it was between us as we circled in. It sounded like a small one, a young sidewinder. We looked down at nothing, an emptiness on the ground that was making a buzzing fury.

Someone said: "We're just out walking, nothing to get excited over. We know you're there."

The snake's rattling subsided and then stopped. We kept on, and finally set camp in the dark. I woke at dawn. I crawled from my sleeping bag into a realm of blown sand. A void encircled me, occupying every horizon. There was no wind, only a still and pale sky. I got up and stepped barefoot across sand fine as table salt. Not 3 feet away, I stopped at a fresh track left by a sidewinder. I followed it with my eyes back toward my gear, finding that while I slept a snake had passed beside my head. It left a graceful, rhythmic print, something written in script. I bent down to the track and looked very closely. The sand was so smooth it revealed each slick, broad scale on the snake's belly. Looking for a place to urinate, I stepped over the track without scuffing it. I came upon a second sidewinder track, and then a third beyond that, and a fourth crisscrossing a fifth. Rattlesnakes were everywhere.

In the coming days we walked over countless tracks, and not one of us was bitten. We emerged out the other side, better men for what we did. AH