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.