Along the Way

ALONG THE WAY When It Comes to Rattlesnakes, Heed the Tale of the Zuni

At the sound of the rattle I froze, barely suppressing an urge to spring into the air like a scared-stiff pronghorn and decamp with a white flash of rump. You see, I couldn't determine where the rattlesnake lay coiled, warning me to get off his rock with twofanged, slit-eyed, forked-tongue sincerity.Mind you I was perfectly willing to leave. But I didn't want to step over him in the process, Stifling that thought, I tried to echolocate the rattler. I settled on a crack at the base of a rock about five feet to my left. Gingerly I crouched and peered into the crack from a safe distance. I already felt much reassured, since rattlesnakes don't actually want to waste venom on anything as manifestly uneatable as a human being. Rattlers aren't nibblers, after all. They've got to swallow you whole to get anything out of the experience.

I spotted the rattler just inside the crack, his tongue gathering in the stray molecules of my fright-based pheromones. Just behind him, another tightly coiled rattler took up the warning. I found them quite convincing.

Not that rattlers are any great shakes as people killers. About 6,000 to 8,000 humans get bitten by snakes in the United States every year, including about 300 persons in Arizona, which boasts the greatest variety of rattlesnakes in the country. Our rattlesnakes come in 11 species, ranging from the 20inch-long desert-grassland massasauga to the 5%-foot Western diamondback. But fewer than one percent of the people bitten actually die, in part because when rattlers bite people they inject venom only about onefourth of the time. Most of the people who die failed to seek medical attention, including injections of antivenin that keep the venom from shutting down the circulatory system. Arizona emergency room doctors have developed a certain bemused contempt for people who go out of their way to get bitten, especially those who suffer from alcohol poisoning.

One Tucson emergency room doctor recounted the story of a young fellow who kept a fully fanged rattlesnake in an aquarium as a conversation piece for his drinking buddies. One day toward the bottom of a bottle of Jack Daniels, he decided to teach his rattlesnake a thing or two about tongue-flicking. This seems a trifle arrogant, even for a young man on a first-name basis with Jack Daniels. Rattlesnakes, after all, have little to learn about tongue-flicking. Still, the fellow got down at snake level and commenced the lesson. The course of study It was brief. The rattlesnake bit him full on the tongue. But wait. It gets better. The punctured tongue naturally enough commenced to swell. The fuddled fellow then recalled reading that an electric current breaks down rattlesnake venom. So he had a friend hot-wire his tongue to a car battery. This experiment finally convinced him to seek medical attention. Personally I prefer the Zuni attitude toward rattlesnakes, cribbed from the book Zuni Folk Tales by Frank Cushing.

Long, long ago there lived at Yathlpew'nan many rattlesnakes, which were then men and women but of a rattlesnake kind. One day the children of one house went to play on the steep banks of a river, taking with them their tiny sister. They placed the little girl carefully to one side and ran to slide down the banks of the river. She watched them play until she could no longer contain her excitement, running then very quickly to the bottom of the hill. Alas, her elder sister slid down the hill, crushing her. The children carried her tiny body back home, crying.

When they reached the village, everyone who saw the mutilated body of the beloved child cried out in grief, falling down on the ground and wriggling and rattling in their anguish, acquiring the forms they carry to this day.

Therefore, concluded the Zuni storyteller, we must remember that rattlesnakes were once splendid people and should not be killed needlessly.

Stepping carefully away from the rock harboring those two loudly grieving reptiles, I decided the Zunis understood far more about rattlesnakes than certain modern humans do about car batteries.