Thinkpieces

Fox Snakes

sharing rural Wisconsin with five-foot reptiles

August Rubrecht |

    Since we don’t have any poisonous snakes in Drammen Township, the mere sight of a snake doesn’t scare me much. Enough to give me little start, maybe, and a sharp intake of breath, but not enough to make me soil my underwear. Word has it that fox snakes are good at getting rid of mice and gophers, so on the whole I’m grateful when one takes up residence nearby.

Our local fox snakes have suffered bad luck, though. One set up headquarters in our garden shed. When I first noticed it, it was about four feet long. Once when I went to the shed to get a hoe, it was lying on a shelf next to the corner where I lean the tools, and it didn’t move when I picked up the hoe. It was still there when I put the hoe back, and still there the next day. That time, I noticed that its eyes had clouded up; the reason it was resting in one place so long was that it was getting ready to shed its skin. The process renders a snake temporarily blind, and this one had found a comfortable place to wait till its sight was restored. The following day, all I found was its cast-off skin. It had sloughed it off by rubbing against the edge of a shovel.

The snake stuck around. Every summer I would see it a time or two, and eventually its cast-off skins were almost five feet long. Then one day the dogs, Stella and Holly, started barking excitedly and staring at a patch of grass; an animal had evidently just gone past their pen. I thought it was probably one of the rabbits that had been defoliating my beans, and picked up a shotgun. But I couldn’t see any rabbit, so I let the dogs out. Two or three times they had chased rabbits down to the old machine shed some 50 yards from the garden shed and bayed them in a pile of lumber where I could get a shot. Not this time. They pounced on this creature only 10 yards from the garden shed, and as soon as Stella started shaking it, I saw it was that fox snake. I pulled the dogs off and put them back in the pen, but it was too late. They had broken its back. I gave the snake the coup de grace with a shovel and buried it in the garden.


There had been another incident a few years earlier. A three-foot fox snake had developed the habit of crawling up to the undercarriage of my car and resting on the frame. I suspected there were openings in the body of the car where it could make its way into the passenger compartment, and I didn’t want that. Imagine how hard it would be to concentrate on your driving with a snake slithering up your britches leg. I always tried to remember to rev the engine and let it run for 30 seconds or so before engaging the clutch. That way if the snake happened to be under there, it would drop down and crawl away.
In a hurry once to get to Tank Creek at Hixton, I forgot. After driving 40 miles and parking at the creek, I noticed what looked like a loose cable hanging down beside a front wheel. It was that snake, all addled from being scuffed and beaten up. Apparently it had tried repeatedly to crawl off the frame while I was tooling along on I-94. After the car had been parked there a while, the snake eased down and limped off into the grass. If it didn’t survive, I’m sorry.

I’m not sorry, though, that it refrained from coming inside and crawling up my leg while I was driving. Probably in that case neither one of us would have survived. And the EMTs would have been shocked at the state of my underwear.