Читать книгу 8 Bags of Mice - Z.C. Christie - Страница 14

SNAKES

Louisiana has snakes, at least five poisonous species, last I heard. I didn’t bother to verify this information online when informed of this, figuring it was safer to simply avoid any and all snakes while I lived there. Ha.

You can try to avoid them, but if you live near the water, they just come up on their own to check you out. We lived in a big house built on top of dozens of four foot cement pillars, on a property that bordered on the bayou. The house was constructed this high because the bayou flooded its banks every time it rained, and our house was the only one on the block that didn’t have an adequate retaining wall.

Remnants of an old wall were visible along the waterfront, but rain meant that the water crept right up to the back deck the collapsed, sunk-in-the-mud wall. Growing down by the remnants of the flood wall were tall, messy bunches of leafy plant type things, a perfect hang-out spot for snakes such as water moccasins… cottonmouths, some folks call them. They are venomous, aggressive and smelly. These snakes smell they are mean, territorial as all get out, and they will come right after you if they think you’re on their turf.

Our house had an upstairs balcony off one of the bedrooms. I was sweeping it clean one afternoon and happened to glance over the railing at a big pile of dirt on the lawn below. Landscaping was going on and dirt was all over, uprooted plants, etc.

One of our younger cats was batting a paw at a section of black hose lying on top of the dirt pile, and I thought, who in the heck cut up the hose? Husband is not going to be happy over that…and then the hose moved and one end lifted and at the cat.

Snake. Black snake. long black snake, right below me, hissing at the cat. I screamed, of course, and then threw the broom at it like a spear (wondering as I did, if snakes could climb balconies) and judging my distance to the door, in case it decided to leap at me. The snake didn’t kill the stupid cat that was still batting at it, but instead, slithered off the pile of dirt and disappeared directly under my deck.

deck. The part that was right outside my back door, where I came in and out of a dozen times a day, my kids, too. Right there under which was wooden and had spaces in between the boards where an evil snake could possibly poke its head through and bite someone I loved.

I called Husband, who naturally said I was overreacting, and that the snake was probably gone by now. I overreacted a lot more and said I the snake wasn’t gone. So I went out the front door (which was on level ground, no deck underneath)to run over to where the neighbor’s lawn man was working and told him what I had seen.

He went and got a gun out of his pickup (nearly all Louisiana males over the age of eight have a gun, or access to one at all times), then went over to crouch by the back deck, squinted, looked, squinted again…he didn’t see any snake, but since it was dark under the house and the snake was black, “Well, ma’am, could be I jes’ don’ see it.”

“Well, guess not. Thanks for coming over with the gun and um… how long are you going to be working next door today?”

“Not fer long, ma’am,” he said, and then he recommended I buy boxes of mothballs and sprinkle the contents under the deck, especially where I had seen the snake go under, near the back stairs. “Snakes don’t like them mothball smells,” I was informed.

So I ran to the Walmart and bought four big boxes of mothballs, which I could smell even before I opened the box, yuch. I left them in the bag on the back deck for Husband to spread, of course, when he got home.

I never saw that particular snake again, but I have no idea if it was the mothballs that drove it away or not. I do know that they smelled so badly, it kept of us away from the back stairs and back door. You literally could not breathe for the fumes coming off those fuzzy little white balls, it took a month for the smell to go away.

That snake probably moved farther under the house, dug a new apartment and was settled in under the middle deck steps, for all I know.

It wasn’t the last snake I saw in Louisiana, though, not by a long shot…