In Which Our Intrepid Blogger Meets Up with a Rattlesnake in the Woods, and What Happened Then

Actually, I never even saw the rattlesnake.

Hearing it was enough.

Let me admit just it up front: snakes scare me.

(I can't help but feel that, as a pagan, this constitutes something of a moral failing on my part, but there we are.)

That's why my first encounter with a rattlesnake in the wild surprised me so much.

“You be careful in those woods,” said my Aunt Bernie, “this is Snake Country.”

Well, I'd known the woods for years and felt perfectly at home in them. So, bushwhacking down the old overgrown logging trail, I wasn't being particularly careful that day, or even paying much attention.

When I heard the rattle, my first instinct was to laugh: it sounded exactly like a baby's rattle. Exactly.

I stop and stand still. I look and see nothing.

A sense of utter calm descends.

You know the old story.

The holy man is sitting by the river one day when he sees a snake borne along on the current. He grabs a stick and fishes the snake out of the water. It's stiff with cold, practically dead.

The holy man opens his shirt and puts the snake in his bosom. Slowly, the warmth of his body revives the snake.

Then it bites him.

“What the f*ck?” says the holy man. “Here I am, a holy man, filled with love and compassion for all living beings. I save your life, and your response is to bite me? What the f*ck?”

The snake looks at the holy man.

“Dude,” he says, “I'm a snake.”

The logic was inescapable.

“Well,” I think, “I can't see the snake, but I know that it's in front of me. I know that it isn't behind me, because I just came that way.”

So slowly, calmly, I turn around and go back the way I came.

To each people, its own law.

That's where the holy man went wrong. He was expecting the snake to live by human law, but snakes don't live by human law. They live by Snake Law.

That's why—unlike, say, the Holy—the Wise make it a point to know—along with Wolf Law and Deer Law, and all the other Laws of the Forest—a little something about Snake Law.

Reader, be told.