Lazy hours ticked away on an invisible clock, I having long ago shed my watch, without further rodent-related incidents, and the settled torpor brought me back to my summer reading. As the stage silently reset itself, however, a new player, like the previous, entered from stage up. A crashing sound in the canopy above, protracted and increasing in volume, as the sound of a boulder tumbling through underbrush towards us, roused Doug and I from our second bout of river-induced malaise. As suddenly as it had started, it ceased, and we caught each other staring idly at the ground in the space between us, empty as it had been before the ruckus. This, of course, led our gazes upward. Perhaps ten feet off the ground, the lowest hanging collection of light cottonwood branches was swaying rhythmically in a broad, two foot arc, entirely at odds with the lack of prevailing breeze. At first glance it seemed a simple anomaly, but between the twirling, serrated fringed leaves, the sunlight flashed off a foreign set of colors. Glimpses of yellow and black gave way to a new picture as our brains began to fill in the camouflaged gaps and an alternating pattern of stripes appeared, long and sinuous, coiled and clinging to the over burdened young offshoots of the cottonwood.
Above us was strung a nearly five foot long bull snake, holding on for dear life to the safety net he had discovered. As far as we could guess, he had been much further up in the tree (for bull snakes are know to be tree climbers) and, be it by wind or serpentine error, had slipped off a safer perch to land here, within our viewing range. A note of surprise escaped Doug’s lips in the form of another Biblical comment about snakes and trees, but it was I, ironically, that offered the more scientific solution. Clearly, here, was my mouse-friend’s antagonist, who minutes before had likely been rooting through the mouse homes of this cottonwood village in search of a helplessly infantile meal. How quickly, though, the tables had turned, and he who transformed mice into skydivers was now just such a performer himself.
Of all harsh mouse realities, surely a full grown and ravenous bull snake, untethered from the earth, must be the most in contrast to the soft-lined safety of the nest. The slow, almost imperceptible movements of the snake poking his head into a cottony den, followed by the abrupt speed of a strike on one’s sleeping sibling, is a rude awakening proven violent enough to send mice into aerial acrobatics. It is a lesson that, one way or another, every mouse learns, for the snake is ever present along the shore of the Missouri river. Silent and pervasive, a disturbed and waving line of tall grasses, or a ripple on the water’s surface as it skates across the water tension, is all that is often seen of the predator’s far reaching movements. The snake is unforgiving and audaciously capitalist, taking the easiest prey first, always finding the path of least resistance. His frozen smile, often mistaken for a grin, belies the emotionless, reptilian mind that hides behind the pitch black eyes of the bull snake. He neither cares for his young nor those of others, for he is the definition of cold blooded; unable to generate his own heat, he steals it from other sources. The reality of life, for mice and men, are these snakes in the grass who imbue pastoral scenes with worry, placing questions on the field fringes, wondering who is watching, who is entering, and who is already there. Happy mouse-homes and shelters from the cold grow eggshell thin in the face of this new order, this real order, that snake ambassadors prove to be the defining reality as they break down the cotton-laced barriers of smaller, more comfortable, more convenient manners of existing. Some mice, lulled into complacency by the comforts of the den, seem unable to sense the snake head at the door, their whole world ending at its frame. They are the ones that do not struggle when the snake strikes, as if they didn’t see it coming, or maybe that they did and have simply been waiting for it, even hoping for it, the thought of fending it off too much for their mouse-minds to contend with. If only these were the few rather than the multitude, but oh, how well fed the snakes are.
Non-venomous and non-threatening to humans, I envisioned the snake falling to the ground so I could pick him up and briefly unleash on him the fear he had struck in the mice, but this bull was no fledgling and, unlike the mice, was adept in the art of tree scaling. His balance regained, he began the process of winding his way into the upper limbs. Occasionally turning his head in our direction to test our scent with a vibrating, forked tongue, his gaze betrayed no hint of embarrassment over the fall, for surely, such a sensation was beyond his reckoning. Stretching up onto one of the low, sturdier arms of the cottonwood, he continued his endless mission of mammal hunting as the sun curled over the apex of its daily arch and too began to fall out of the sky it had climbed into.
Concluded in Part III
1 comment:
nice dood.
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