Now, Bill has never been afraid of snakes. Family lore has it that as a boy he went on missions to clean water moccasins out of the swimming hole. He would lay out fishhooks and lines on the bank to capture them, and then string the trophies together to impress the other kids.

I only heard of him bringing a snake into the house once. It was a copperhead in a jar. He’d decided to keep it in his room. Luckily, his Dad found it before his Mom did. If it had been the other way around he’d have likely finished his childhood in military school.

You see, Bill’s Mom doesn’t like snakes. His Dad does. As a matter of fact, he goes on missions to rescue all the cornsnakes and ratsnakes from unenlightened persons and gives them asylum in his barn so they can eat the rats. But as she points out, how do the snakes know they’re supposed to stay in the barn? Which is a good question.

Once the family was driving out of state when they spotted a great big snake on the road. Bill’s Dad hopped out the car and determined it was alive and nonpoisonous. “We can put it in the car and carry it back to the barn!” he said in great delight. He just about lost more than he would have gained there. His wife told him tightly, “You had better hope that snake can cook and clean, because if it gets in this car I’m getting out.”

Bill is extremely dutiful when he finds a snake. “We need to take this to Daddy to put in the barn!” I don’t know how they can walk in there, the floor must be seething. When he was younger he used to catch rattlesnakes to sell to the snake handling church up on the mountain. But either the rattlers got faster or he got slower, because he doesn’t seem to encounter them anymore.

Our dog, Gus, is interested in snakes too, but a bit more cautious about it. We’re always alerted to their presence by a deep, deliberate “Wuff! WUFF!” coming from the yard. He follows them around, barking the snake bark, until we come out and see what kind it is. Then the snake takes advantage of his distraction to escape.

So one day Gus sounded the alarm and Bill went out to check on it. There was Gus looming over something on the ground. Bill – very injudiciously, I think – said cheerfully, “What have you got there, boy?” Gus showed him.

He seized the snake by the tail and gave it a practiced flip high into the air. Time obligingly slowed down so Bill could watch the snake flying up, up, up, hitting apogee, and coming down, down, down, right at his head. As he said later, “I don’t move very fast these days, but I got out of the way!”  The snake hit the ground and departed posthaste in search of a herpetological shrink.

As I said, Bill has never been afraid of snakes. But for a couple of days there he would sometimes fall uncharacteristically silent. When I’d ask what was wrong, he would answer, ”Nothing. I’m just thinking about that snake.”

Close Encounters: Snakes in Space! is a post from: Fishing for Treasure — Adventures in Junk!