Snake in the Woods

On Monday, John and I took a truck ride over the farms in Penhook and Union Hall to make sure the fertilizer truck could get through on Tuesday. As we went down the old road into the Tom Brown Place, something crossed in front of us. Then it hid in some old logs:

Did you see it? Only the face and tip of the tail is showing.

The poet Emily Dickinson noticed snakes, too:

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him, did you not,
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

Well, this "narrow fellow" wasn't in the grass; it was in the logs. When I saw it, I grabbed the camera and jumped out of the truck to take some pictures. Take a closer look. See it peeking out?

The black snake beat its tail against the log to frighten me off, but the ploy didn't work. In dry leaves, the beating tail will sound like a rattlesnake's rattles, but this critter didn't scare me. In the above picture, you can just see the tip of the tail in front of the snake's face.

When John moved the log, the snake decided not to stick around.

It stuck out its tongue at me one more time before it made itself into a whiplash and slithered into the woods. 

I didn't breathe tighter or feel zero at the bone; actually, I thought this little black critter was kinda cute.

~