It was one of those incredible moments when you would give almost anything to have a camera, particularly a video camera, with you, but you don't. My family and I were traveling to a friend's house to take down some juniper trees when something in the road caught my eye. I'm one of those inexplainable oddities who actually tries to NOT run over a snake when I see it in the road, and when I realized I was looking at one I swerved to the left. I missed the snake, but looking in my rearview mirror I could see that this one wasn't crawling out of the way. So I backed up in order to chase it off the road before a less hospitable motorist could drive by.
What I found when I reached the place where the snake had been was nothing short of shocking. First off, the snake that had made me stop was already off the road by then. But there on the shoulder where it had crossed were two more of them, intertwined. The larger of the two was on its back, and the other one, perhaps two inches shorter than the four feet of the first one, had the entire length of its body snug up against the other's. My first reaction, as I'm sure would have been the reaction of most people, was to believe they were mating. But a closer look proved this to not be true. First, their "parts" weren't connected, and secondly, the larger snake was dead! It's head had been run over by a previous car.
So here were these two snakes, a dead one, on its back, and a live, slightly smaller one, that had completely "embraced" the first one and was writing and back and forth like crazy. Now, I'm no herpitologist (snake scientist), but as I watched this live snake's activity a number of things came to me. It appeared that he/she, the live snake, was by virtue of lying on and around the dead snake and writhing madly back and forth, trying to bring life back into it, or to coax it to move. Another possibility was that it was actually trying to move it farther out of the roadway, out of danger's path. Either way, the live snake was so engrossed in whatever it was doing that I was able to pet its body, and it gave no sign that it even noticed. It didn't hiss, didn't try to get away, just continued this bizarre "dance of death" that it was occupied in when we arrived.
We ended up staying there watching it for fifteen or twenty minutes, and all the while the snake tried to move its buddy, its mate, its brother/sister--whatever the connection was--off the road, or to bring it back to life by moving with it, perhaps sort of a reptilian artificial rescuscitation. Finally, I picked up the dead snake and moved it to a safer place several feet off the road. I have known too many people who might have seen it on the road edge and gone out of their way to run it over, killing the other one in the process. This brought about the first change in the live snake's activity. Once we put the live one down in the grass as well, it darted away from the dead snake, and I thought it was going to make its escape. However, I picked it back up by the tail and held its head near the dead snake for a couple of seconds. At that point, the snake seemed to recognize its comrade once more, and once more it entwined itself with the body of the dead one and began trying to move it. Now, of course, the snakes were nowhere near the road, and it seemed the obvious conclusion was not that the live snake was trying to move the other one off the road but truly was acting as a rescuscitator.
We left and chopped junipers for over an hour, and when we returned we were shocked to find that the snake was still there, performing his rescuscitative efforts. This time we rushed home with our load of wood and grabbed the camera. However, when we made it back half an hour later things had changed. The live snake was still there, but now he was still. The sun had moved, causing a nearby juniper to throw shade over the snakes and chilling them. Either that fact or perhaps sheer exhaustion had caused the snake to stop trying to "save" his friend. I tried moving them both out into the sunshine again, but it was as if the cold shadows had broken the spell, broken his obsession, so to speak. The live snake slithered away into the low branches of the junipers, and we let him go.
But that snake has left me pondering: What do we as humans really, truly know about the feelings, the "emotions" of the animal world. Many people like to believe that we are the only beings who can think or feel, who do more than just react to circumstances. Perhaps in the case of this snake that is true. Or perhaps there is something more, something deeper, that no mere human being can understand. I don't know. I can't pretend to. All I do know is that on that warm spring day I was witness to something I have never seen in 44 years of life, 44 years as an amateur snake "expert," something I will probably never see again. I will always wonder what the connection between those snakes truly was, and I will always wonder what purpose the living snake had in mind. I guess it's just another mystery for the ages.
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