Mean Animals I Have Known
By
Thom Cantrall
Once again I find life and Hollywood to be at odds. In all the movies I’ve ever seen wherein animals are actually allowed to appear as themselves, in their real personae and not some Disneyesque scenario where wild animals are portrayed as living in family groups with Papa Bear, Mama Bear and Baby Bear living in harmony with their bunny and squirrel neighbors, the mean ones, if depicted at all are conspicuously obvious. Who could but realize immediately upon seeing him that Shere Kahn is absolutely up to no good and wishes nothing but evil to the “man cub” in “The Jungle Book”?
Even when actual animals are playing the part of animals, often with the help of plastic stand-ins, we are not allowed the honor of determining for ourselves the level of innate goodness embodied therein. “Jaws”, for example could not make an appearance without being introduced with a blood chilling rendition of some soul-tingling mood music. I know that one Great White Shark bears a strikingly close resemblance to any other Great White Shark much the same as one crow bears an exact resemblance to any other crow in the world. But, that not withstanding, did we need to be told that this creature was dangerous? Wouldn’t the simple appearance of a tall fin jutting out of the water tell us his intentions?
As a person who has spent a great percentage of his life among God’s Creatures, I can attest to anyone so inclined that no such warnings as those described above have ever preceded any close encounter of the malevolent kind among Mother Nature’s children. Not once have I ever heard the tum-tum-tum-tum… tum-tum-tum-tum that Jaws engendered when approaching any critter that might wish me ill!
In my single digit and very early double digit years I spent well over seventy-five percent of the daylight and a substantial portion of the not-so-daylight hours when not serving time in that venerable institution that was the bane of my ilk… School… anywhere but under a roof.
Much of this time was invested in exploring every square foot of my uncle’s ranch and the surrounding environs. Fences held no meaning for me at this juncture and location other than a necessary inconvenience meant to keep livestock restricted to a predetermined area… more or less, considering the shape in which most of these backwoods fences were kept.
Many of them had been erected by the Spanish when General Mariano Vallejo had owned this vast Northern California domain and had seen little in the way of maintenance since that time. To say that most were decrepit would have been liberal in description… actually, most were worse than that. As a consequence, this was pretty much open range to both the cattle and sheep that grazed these timber and brushlands as well as to small boys who were, truly, pint sized disciples of Lewis and Clark, Kit Carson and Jedediah Smith. But, I digress…
This ranch was home to about four or five million Western Rattlesnakes. Indeed, it seemed that these rattlesnakes were the only thing that did grow in profusion on this back-woods ranch. Now, perhaps I’ve exaggerated a bit, but suffice it to say that they were common and they grew large. I know that the official records say that this snake does not exceed five feet (1.52 m) in length, but I could have shown those experts several specimens that exceeded that conservative length considerably. Probably the largest I ever saw personally was one my cousin Shirley killed under the clothesline just out the back door of the house. This snake measured over six feet (2 m) in length without its head. This snake had a girth of over eight inches (19.3 cm) and looked particularly menacing. For the most part, the only time we ever killed a rattlesnake is when it was in proximity to the house or could pose a danger to some of us. While I know that television tends to portray the rattlesnake in a coiled position, head poised to strike and rattles singing, I actually saw that in the wild so rarely that I thought for many years that we had demented or, at least, unnatural snakes. Yes, when provoked, our snakes would coil and assume that classic pose, but it was an extremely rare circumstance, for sure, when a snake let forth with his singing buzz. Generally speaking, he had to be provoked heartily to induce that buzz. Normally, as soon as he was no longer being prodded or poked, he just uncoiled and slithered on about his rattlesnake business without so much as a “by your leave” or even a glance back. Though, he would probably have shaken his head and shrugged his shoulders, had he had them, at the ignominy of this treatment he had received.
The one notable exception to this general rule occurred one warm spring day when Tony, our trusty and tired saddle horse, and I were returning from a morning’s excursion to the edge of the wilderness, an area of immature Madrone trees about two inches (5 cm) in diameter and twenty feet (7 m) tall that had been killed in a fairly recent wildfire that had passed through the area. This created a nightmarish land of soot-covered stems reminiscent of a black bamboo jungle. Only the foolish ever entered the Wilderness… a second time. On the morning in question we had just made the trek for much the same reason people climb mountains… because they are there. It had been a pleasant foray and had served to clear my mind of the cobwebs engendered during the previous week by Mr. Wilson, my fifth grade teacher in his never-ending quest for dangling participles or split infinitives or something of the sort. The ride had worked wonders on my over-taxed nervous system, serving to remind me that if a noun wanted to dangle its gerund, it was by no means my fault!
I was smiling inwardly and drowsing outwardly in the late morning sun. Tony, for his part, was taking it all pretty much in stride and was nearly as asleep as I was. The road we were on was no proper road, but a cat trail cut out by the massive blade of my uncle’s venerable TD-24 bulldozer in the quest for the huge Coastal Redwood trees (Sequoia Sempervirons) that grew there. These cat roads laced the mountainside, providing the foot-weary a fairly comfortable place to walk. They were, at least, brush free and coated in about six or so inches (9 cm) of loose, flowing dust. The dusty trail was the morning newspaper of the mountainside. In it you could read the travels of the local denizens… deer, lizards, snakes, mice, skunks raccoons and weasels… they all left note of their passing for the alert reader.
On this particular day, however, “alert” was not a word I would use to describe either Tony of myself. I was slumped in the saddle, nearly asleep in the sun, the reins wrapped loosely around the pommel... My feet were dangling on either side of the horse, free of the stirrups. All in all, it was about as pleasant a morning as a lad of my few years could have imagined until we rounded a curve and, directly under Tony’s belly a rather large rattler let out with a very loud and penetrating buzz that immediately served to transform an idyll into a nightmare.
I immediately recognized the sound for what it was and, unfortunately, so did Tony. His immediate reaction, born of an innate, if heretofore unknown, dread of large rattlesnakes, was to launch himself straight vertical for a considerable distance. I’ll have to leave the exact altitude attained to one’s imagination as, at that moment, I was much too busy for quantitative research.
Words my father had uttered only a week or so prior, on the occasion of my arriving back at the barn on Tony and being in the saddle but sound asleep, came to mind... “Thomas (actually, he called me Tommy… a habit I could not break him of his entire life!) one of these days something is going to spook him and he’s going to throw you so high the crows will have time to build a nest in your behind (actually, my dad’s language being as colorful as it was, “behind” was not the exact word he used here) before you hit the ground!” That, along with certain other predictions regarding the effects on my anatomy of some of my antics served to suggest to me that he would have had a fair future as a prophet had he chosen to pursue that end. With maturity, something you could have gotten pretty long odds, in this era, against my ever surviving long enough to reach, has come the realization that, perhaps, “Natural Consequence” may have had more to do with his prognostications than did any sense of the supernatural or ethereal.
It amazes me even today, more than a half century later, how clearly those thoughts came to mind while I was still in the ascent stage and was diligently applying what I knew of , added to what I was learning of the physics of flight, even while contemplating the inevitable… Somewhere below me was a crazed horse and, below him, an angry, vociferous rattlesnake. Even though I was still gaining altitude at the moment of this thought, I knew that, eventually, gravity being what it was, I was going to going to have to effect a landing. Although I was, at present, navigating quite well, I was not at all sure that such benevolent circumstances would long continue, let alone persevere.
While time seemed to hang suspended, I could feel myself losing velocity as I neared the