The shady grove with its soft mattress of pine needles is awfully inviting after a morning of creek bassin’. Reclining against a pine, I eat sardines with already fishy fingers and feel delightfully raccoonish when I sense another being nearby.
I don’t know how I know this, but I do.
I’ve long believed intuition is never plucked from the clear blue; stimuli trigger those gut feelings we like to chalk up to the mystical. My animal senses have detected some subtle sensation that my domesticated, civilized brain can’t quite decipher just yet.
Someone else is here. Someone small. Slow. Low. Close.
I peer hard, picking through dead pine needles, spying a thickness out of place among the thin, twining muscadine vines. Earthen colors draped across an elongated shape—taupe accented with a pattern of soft, light, milk chocolate patches. A rectangular head that barely separates from the body. Round pupils. I don’t notice these clues individually, checking them off one by one, but take them in holistically. I see the whole through the sum of its parts.
It’s a prairie kingsnake.
It took merely a glance to identify, as it should for a seasoned serpent observer. In truth, I’m more than that. For most of my years, a nonvenomous snake within arm’s reach was a snake I aimed to touch. A look was never enough. I needed to feel that rope of muscle tightening around my arm and the smooth glide of cool scales on my skin. And if you’re going to catch ‘em, you best know who you’re catching.
But I don’t catch snakes anymore, not much, anyway. I can’t reckon potentially scaring and stressing a little animal for nothing more than my amusement. Now I catch only for educational purposes and to relocate out of harm’s way.
Now I mostly just talk to them.
Though they lack external ears, snakes are equipped to be excellent listeners. Silent and almost supernaturally perceptive, they detect the tiniest vibrations, scent molecules, and even (for some) fluctuations in the body temperature of other nearby creatures. All of these numinous abilities are necessities for beings evolved to live on their bellies.
Evolution’s churning search for what works for right now has produced a family of limbless beasts who have been around for more than 100 million years. Obviously, it’s a form that has performed marvelously. All snakes can navigate (to various degrees depending on species) with ease on both water and land. Some can climb a tree by gripping nothing but bark with their scales. How is that possible? Some can burrow like a mole. There are even flying snakes, though, in truth these fantastical beasts are merely gliders like flying squirrels.
All are predators. And I’ll admit that even as a lover of snakes their methods of killing are the stuff of nightmares. Some simply overpower other animals and engulf them whole. Some employ a lethal embrace, tightening their constriction with the victim’s every exhale. Others inject the gnarliest of biochemical cocktails, a toxic saliva, through hypodermic fangs and wait for the slow but sure death of their prey through paralysis and/or destruction of blood cells.
All of them, without even trying, collect and understand subtleties of this physical world incomprehensible to us more modern animals. Snakes don’t take you only at your word. They examine your chemical makeup, whether you are truly warm-blooded or cold-blooded, the lightness or heaviness with which you tread upon the Earth—the totality of you.
I can’t help but think that these endowments are components of an ancient wisdom that I, too, could know, a wisdom that I should know. I'm envious.
I place my palms on the bed of pine needles and speak to the kingsnake as low as I can, hoping she (I think it is a “she”) can feel my intended good vibes. Her body language says it’s working. She lies loosely coiled in what I take for a relaxed state. Her quick pink tongue flickers in an old rhythm I somehow recognize. She scoops up the airborne particles of my essence, collecting more information about me than I know about myself, as I try to conjure up an amiable aroma.
But who does a snake count as friend? Who in the kingdoms of life on this planet would want a snake to like them? How could she possibly know that I do? Can she sift through the scent of my dead skin sloughing off (just like snakes do, but ours is a tiny patch at a time as opposed to the snake’s wholesale unzipping) and my oily mammalian glands to determine my intent?
She eases toward me, which I take as a gracious acceptance of my odors as well as the soft-spoken request to admire her lithe form and the subtle exquisiteness of her existence. I ease onto my stomach, as close as I can get to eye level with her, trying to grasp at least a smidge of her perspective on life.
I sniff, but my efforts are largely lacking. I can smell the greenness of the creek, the stale turpentine of pine needles, even the saccharine scent of fallen sycamore leaves. But I can’t smell her.
I stick out my tongue just for the hell of it.
Nothing.
I pound a rock into the forest floor and can’t detect a single tiny wave through my scaleless belly, but the kingsnake feels it. She shifts slightly, an almost imperceptible movement, then becomes stone for what seems like minutes—waiting, feeling, listening, watching, smelling, perceiving with every cell of her being. Her absolute stillness seems impossible, a display of patience and mute awareness I’ve never come close to emulating.
Realization washes over me: I make a damn poor snake.
Then, for reasons known only to her, she uncoils in silence. Rippling like a stream of muddy water, an occasional glimmer of pearly translucence sparking from her form, she glides off in search of whatever prairie kingsnakes search for on fine spring mornings. Likely a living thing to eat.
I watch her tail vanish over a small rise and feel the sun pressing hot on my neck. Slithering over to a shadier patch, I take a swig from the flask and close my eyes. I roll onto my belly and lie as motionless as I can for as long as I can.