The Red Hourglass

by Gordon Grice

A man rode over grassy pasture toward a stand of oaks, where he hoped to have his lunch in shade. He noticed a bird weaving among the trees while he was still a mile away.

  He thought the bird’s odd flight might make more sense as he got closer. Rushing up from somewhere near the ground, spewing some raucous invective he’d never heard from an avian throat, turning up rapidly and then spinning into a kamikaze dive, the bird was so thoroughly occupied that it didn’t react to the man’s approach.

  When he was within the shade of the oaks, the man smelled rattlesnake. His horse shied a bit. The snake was moving out of the grove, rattling sporadically. The bird, rain-cloud gray with bursts of white, was dive-bombing the rattler. The man looked carefully—as carefully as he could without dismounting. The snake was wounded around the neck, and its bloody face was eyeless. The bird visited a nest in one of the trees, then dove again: a rush of threatening screams that only a mockingbird could make, a rising buzz, and then the bird rose, the whole pass too fast for the man to see what exactly the bird had done. The snake must long since have given up trying to strike the faster bird. He simply dragged his ragged, dying body toward the tall grass.

  Mockingbirds are territorial, and will attack even people and dogs that venture near their nests. They’ve been known to keep after a rattlesnake for an hour. They don’t relent even when the snake leaves their territory; they follow and perform an execution.

  This all depends on the bird’s detecting the snake. Things can go the other way if the snake gets in the first shot. Rattlesnakes have been found in the nests of mockingbirds, eating every last egg.

  The extravagant violence between reptile and bird makes a more obvious kind of sense than the preemptive killings by hoof. Rattlesnake and mockingbird are natural enemies whose relation hinges on predation, the snake trying to eat the bird’s young, the bird getting nasty at first sight of the snake.

  If the mockingbird reacts to the rattlesnake with violence born of fear, several other birds react to it with fearless hunger.

  The golden eagle plucks a rattler from a vast expanse of wind-rippled grass. You see the silhouette rise into the sky: the bird’s wings slapping the air like sheets on the line, the snake twisting and knotting in the rugged talons that have already dealt him fatal wounds. Sometimes the snake manages to reach the eagle with a fatal strike as they struggle high in the air.

  The rattler is lethal at one end and scary at the other, but in between it’s a tube of protein irresistible to many predators. Hawks and owls take rattlers, but so do some less obvious avian predators, like wild turkeys and domestic chickens. The tough, scaly legs common in birds give them an edge over snakes. The roadrunner specializes in rattlers and never seems to get bitten.

  Other rattlesnake predators include domestic cats and pigs, skunks, badgers, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, and other snakes. Some kinds of kingsnake live mainly on rattlers, which they kill by constriction and swallow whole. There’s a beautiful iridescent pink snake with a texture like braided rawhide that hunts by sight, rearing up and looking around for prey. It’s called the coachwhip, and it often eats rattlesnakes.

  Whatever advantages the rattler’s venom may provide, they don’t include freedom from predation. To some animals, the rattler is only a potential meal; to an astounding number of others, it is something so fearsome it must be either fled from—or killed on sight. No other animal provokes such visceral reactions from other species.

  A couple rented a building for their motorcycle accessory business. The poured cement floor of the old building was divided into neat islands full of chrome and leather. Several months after the shop opened, the weather turned cool and the trouble started.

  The woman was sitting at the desk doing paperwork when she heard a sound she described as “someone turning on a shower.” She pushed away from the desk, her swivel chair shooting back on its rollers. In the instant of moving she looked down to see the rattlesnake’s strike in a blur. The strike fell short of her retreating leg. About an inch short.

  The woman ran for her baseball bat. She claims the rattler then became the recipient of a twenty-minute batting practice from which it did not emerge alive.

  Up to this point, her experience was not unusual. Rattlesnakes do occasionally come into buildings for warmth. For example, some friends of mine had a house in the country. They came home one evening to find a sizable rattler coiled beside the washing machine in the utility room. The gentleman of the house prodded the intruder outside with a broom before demolishing it with buckshot. My friends had a situation ideal for drawing rattlesnakes. The utility room was flush with the ground. It had, besides the usual warmth of a human habitation, heat-producing machines (washer, dryer, and water heater) that would have been “visible” to the heat sense of a rattlesnake at night. And its floor was cement.

  A surface of cement might as well be a rock for the rattlesnake’s purposes. Like flat rocks, cement surfaces soak up the heat of direct sunlight and pour that heat back into the air at night. Rattlesnakes use such surfaces to control their own body temperature. For example, a rattler emerging from his hiding place at dusk may lie on a radiating rock to get his blood warm for the hunt.

  To my friends, the cement floor in their utility room was a clear indicator of a human territory. In fact, they seemed to consider the rattlesnake’s trespass not merely a danger but an insult. The snake, however, probably wasn’t even aware it would encounter humans, if in fact it had any concept of humans. It simply got cold and followed the heat across a surface that seemed natural enough and easy to move on. It must have had to squeeze through a crack or under the door, but snakes are good at that.

  This problem, disconcerting as it was for my friends, was minor compared to the difficulties encountered by the couple at the motorcycle accessory shop. The day after the close call with the rattlesnake, they discovered a garter snake in the building. The following day brought a kingsnake, and the day after that a bull snake. When I came to visit the shop, no one was there. The cement floor of the building was flush with the ground, and there were several holes in the surrounding earth. A sign on the door read CLOSED DUE TO SNAKES. When I contacted the proprietors, they seemed ashamed, as if they had been publicly exposed as lepers. They found a new building for their business.

  The low cement floor had allowed a few snakes to get inside, but the indoors wasn’t their destination. What drew them in the first place was surely the presence of an ancestral den beneath the building’s foundation.

  When a rattlesnake eats another animal, he eats it all— not just the muscle tissue and organs, but also the bones and fur or feathers. Each prey item he takes is likely to be huge in proportion to his own weight: a four-pound snake eats a two-pound rabbit as readily as a man eats a quarter-pound hamburger. Once he’s converted the meal to energy, the snake doesn’t spend that energy keeping his body temperature constant, as we mammals do. All of this means the snake can stretch its meals a long way. In a laboratory experiment, one rattler survived a year between meals.

  Rattlesnakes adapt to different climates by exploiting this ability. They operate most efficiently in a hot climate, producing abundant venom and hunting year-round, but they can endure winters by simply crawling into holes and hibernating. These hibernating places are dens. The difference between a den and a temporary shelter used in spring and summer is that a den houses an entire congregation of snakes. Denning is the weirdest thing about rattlesnakes. Hibernation doesn’t fully explain it, but it’s a place to start.

  A den can be any cavity—a sinkhole, a cave, a man-made well. Heat helps determine the site. Dens are near flat rocks, ledges, or open ground; rattlesnakes coming out of hibernation need to bask in sun. In the North, dens turn up in the crevices of south-facing slopes— southern exposures get more sun. In the South, where winters are mild, a dip in the ground will do. A friend of mine was reminded of this fact one day while he was hunting. He stepped over a fallen tree onto what he thought was solid ground. It was actually
only a tangle of twigs and leaves that covered a waist-high depression. When he fell in, he heard the sibilant greeting of many rattlers. He quickly arranged to view them from a distance.

  In Texas County, Oklahoma, where I live, the land is mostly flat and free of holes and cracks. The prairie rattlers here use the only available holes, the same ones they use in the active season: prairie dog burrows. One particular prairie dog town in this county extends for something like three square miles, and some of the burrows there house several dozen rattlers each in the winter.

  The scarcity of holes in this landscape has an odd side effect: the group hibernation of natural enemies. The rattler sleeps with the bull snake and the blue racer, species that in their active phases prey on rattlesnakes, killing them by constriction or simply seizing them by the head and swallowing. The prairie dog and the pack rat, perennial victims of snakes, nestle into ophidian masses for the winter. The rattler lies down with its own predators, the badger and the fox.

  A few hours east of here, there’s a country of red earth dominated by mesas. Centuries of rain have carved arroyos down the sides of the mesas. That’s where the Western diamondbacks live, in those red ravines: the country with bigger caves has bigger snakes.

  Denning in numbers helps conserve body heat. The rattlers need to hold a little warmth even when the ground is frozen deep. You can find dens along creek beds where leaves accumulate and rot in the cave-pocked banks, the heat of decomposition warming the snakes. My father worked in a feedlot, where thousands of fattening cattle were packed into pens, eating from a trough, the ground beneath them covered in their own manure. The dung would build into great hills; I often saw mounds taller than the fences. My dad’s job was to whittle down these hills with a front-end loader. He unearthed tangles of snakes beneath the dung: bull snakes, blue racers, and prairie rattlers basking in the subtle rot-heat. Once he dug up a globular snake-mass a foot and a half thick.

  In north Texas a house had stood vacant in the country for years, and when electricians showed up one day to reclaim it for human use, they found it claimed for denning. The men killed eighty snakes and stacked them like dirty laundry.

  After a winter in the den, each snake goes its own way to hunt and maybe mate. A rattlesnake returns to its original den with the coming of cold weather. Newborn rattlesnakes winter in their mothers’ dens. These young snakes have never been there before, but somehow they find their way to the ancestral den. How they do this, and how adults find their way back, is a mystery. Rattlesnakes may navigate by the sun, or they may memorize the way landmarks look to their heat-sense, but these mechanisms don’t explain how the young find a place they’ve never been. One researcher who had spent a great deal of time tracking rattlers, even cutting into the bellies of some to plant radio transmitters before sewing them up and releasing them, threw up his hands and blamed “instinct.”

  Another theory is that the young track the adults to the den by scent. In laboratory tests, young rattlesnakes followed the paths of adults in simple mazes. Whether scent is involved in the wild, no one knows. The young rattlers may be miles from the den and may not have seen their mother for months; if they track only by scent under these circumstances, it’s an astounding feat.

  But the chemical senses of the rattlesnake are so much better than ours that our idea of smelling is a shadow of theirs; we are like congenitally blind people who see only vague masses of gray and light and cannot grasp a sighted person’s feelings toward blood, diamonds, autumn, and Renoir. The rattlesnake can identify the scent of any of his den mates as family. With dozens or hundreds or thousands of summer-wandering snakes trailing the taste of home, the young rattlesnake perceives a world reticulated with traceable connections, a network that reads as clear as the spider’s web does to the touch of its maker or a system of highways does to a human.

  When rattlesnakes convene for denning, they first form a bolus—a ball-shaped cluster, like a collection of rubber bands. Every member of the bolus keeps moving, the pulsing amalgam growing as more snakes arrive. One man peered into a cave and saw a bolus more than four feet thick. There are bigger claims, too, if you want to believe them.

  Writer J. Frank Dobie reported the story of a hired man sent to bring in two grazing mules. The man’s boss heard a scream, and then a fainter one. He found the body in a gully amid hundreds of rattlers. The snakes were forming a bolus. The man, who must have stepped into the gully without looking, was already dead.

  A bolus soon breaks up, and the snakes enter the den. They may form the bolus as a ritual of recognition. Or maybe it has some obscure connection to mating. Or maybe it’s a way of scent-marking each other to help with next year’s den-finding. Nobody really knows.

  The number of snakes in a den varies with species, climate, and predation. Some dens contain only three or four rattlers. And then there are the big ones.

  My friend Michael Gabriel was hunting dove with a friend on a ranch in the Texas Panhandle. Gabriel had a bird in sight. It was flitting between a low cottonwood branch and the edge of a puddle. It was close enough for Gabriel to see the plump muscles of its gray-brown breast. He was moving closer, trying to be unobtrusive. He could hear the bubbling coo of the dove—and then, cutting through that smooth sound, the buzz of a rattlesnake.

  He looked around until he spotted the diamondback lying on the ground three yards away, a safe enough distance for him to stay and watch. The other hunter, having heard the buzz, cautiously joined him. The snake had stopped rattling. It crawled off at a leisurely pace, though not exactly away from the men; instead it was heading toward a nearby tailwater pit. It buzzed again, as if in afterthought.

  Behind the hunters, another buzz answered. They looked around, more concerned this time. They spotted the new rattler, and as they kept glancing around they noticed other rattlesnakes, invisible to the casual glance, but suddenly popping out of the landscape. There were about a dozen in sight, and they stirred and moved, all of them headed for the big tailwater pit. The air was suddenly tainted with their thick smell. Two doves burst from a cottonwood and flew low, crossing the evening sun.

  The hunters watched the snakes move onto a dam that formed one wall of the tailwater pit. They began to disappear into holes in the dam. That’s when Gabriel spotted an enormous diamondback, which he later described as the biggest he’d ever seen.

  That remark means something. Gabriel, as it happens, is a lover of rattlesnakes. He used to have a side business catching rattlesnakes and selling them to a restaurant, a whitewashed cinderblock place that usually served burgers and chicken-fried steaks. But in the summer, one night a week, was an all-you-can-eat rattlesnake buffet.

  For Gabriel, supplying the restaurant was only a way to make a few dollars out of his hobby. He had already been catching rattlers for years. He eats them, tans their hides, has a quart jar full of rattles. He guesses he’s caught a thousand or so. He worked in the oil fields for a while. The vibrations of the drilling rigs drew rattlers in, and they could be found by the dozens coiled on the shady side of a rig. When I visited his home one time, Gabriel opened his freezer to show me a few of his favorite specimens. One was a five-foot diamondback with a pale greenish hide.

  You need to know how much Gabriel loves rattlesnakes to understand what happened next. The giant diamondback dashed for a hole. Gabriel grabbed it by the tail. The snake had stuck its head and part of its body into the hole, but Gabriel had a good grip on the tail. The snake was thicker than his thigh, and the part he could still see was substantially longer than his body. He’s about six feet tall.

  It was a bizarre tug-of-war: the snake trying to slide into the hole, the man trying to hold it out. Gabriel had dropped his rifle to go after the snake. He called to his friend to lend a hand, but the friend only offered a candid appraisal of Gabriel’s mental health. Soon the snake outmuscled the man and slipped underground.

  With the distraction of the giant gone, the two men noticed something they’d been ignoring for a few mi
nutes. It sounded like a beehive, but louder and deeper. Gabriel had seen a dozen or so rattlers going into the same ground, so he knew there was a den somewhere in the dam, but he’d never heard such a sound before, even from a den. The men looked at the ground beneath their feet and knew it was time to leave.

  The owner of the ranch where Gabriel and his friend had been hunting wanted to wipe out the den. He had livestock to lose. He poured diesel fuel into the holes in the dam—a common way of killing out a den, though it pollutes the groundwater. Usually, a few gallons of the suffocating fuel makes the snakes come raging out. The rancher had men standing around with shotguns and garden hoes to finish them when they did.

  Nothing happened. The rancher poured more and more diesel in through different holes. He kept trying until he’d used 150 gallons. No one could imagine why the diesel wasn’t bringing the snakes out. The rancher had killed twenty-seven rattlesnakes on his land that summer, and he suspected a few of his cattle had gone down to rattlers. He wasn’t about to give up.

  He decided to use a backhoe to open the den. The machine dug six feet before puncturing a cavern the size of a spacious living room. Dark, viscous mud, the kind called “black gumbo” in the oil fields, formed the walls. The floor was a writhing carpet of rattlesnakes, so many no one could count them or even guess their number. Diamondbacks and prairie rattlers crawled across each other’s backs. Branching from the large chamber were scores of small tunnels, and snakes moved in and out of these. Panicked by the vibrations and the flood of sunlight, the rattlesnakes set off a chorus of buzzes that drowned the noise of the backhoe. The nauseous smell of agitated rattlers bloomed in the hot air. One man claimed several of the diamondbacks in the pit dwarfed the giant Gabriel had struggled with before.

  The rancher brought around a fuel truck with an electric pump. He sprayed a truckload of gasoline onto the mass of snakes, killing thousands. Hired hands burned the carcasses.