The Sounds of Snakes
While I have not felt like writing much lately, I have continued to read and that allows me to present you with items more interesting than I could otherwise provide. This piece is about snakes and it is from the same book from which I copied, about a month ago, a description of hail storms. In this instance, W. H. Hudson recalls the snake sounds he heard as a child. They were coming from under the floor beneath his bed.
I grew up in an area where there were a lot of snakes, but I can't say I ever heard any, and apart from the ones that rattle, I didn't think snakes made much noise. You will learn from the piece below that they do make sounds and I learned from it what 'ophiology' is. If you are not a fan of snakes, you are warned that the symphony of snakes described here, may give you the shivers.
"Snakes were common enough about us; snakes of seven or eight different kinds, green in the green grass, and yellow and dusky-mottled in dry and barren places and in withered herbage, so that it was difficult to detect them. Sometimes they intruded into the dwelling-rooms, and at all seasons a nest or colony of snakes existed in the thick old foundations of the house, and under the flooring. In winter they hibernated there, tangled together in a cluster no doubt; and in summer nights when they were at home, coiled at their ease or gliding ghost-like about their subterranean apartments, I would lie awake and listen to them by the hour. For although it may be news to some closet ophiologists, serpents are not all so mute as we think them. At all events this kind, the Philodryas aestivus--a beautiful and harmless colubrine snake, two and a half to three feet long, marked all over with inky black on a vivid green ground--not only emitted a sound when lying undisturbed in his den, but several individuals would hold a conversation together which seemed endless, for I generally fell asleep before it finished. A hissing conversation it is true, but not unmodulated or without considerable variety in it; a long sibilation would be followed by distinctly-heard ticking sounds, as of a husky-ticking clock, and after ten or twenty or thirty ticks another hiss, like a long expiring sigh, sometimes with a tremble in it as of a dry leaf swiftly vibrating in the wind. No sooner would one cease than another would begin; and so it would go on, demand and response, strophe and antistrope; and at intervals several voices would unite in a kind of low mysterious chorus, death-watch and flutter and hiss; while I, lying awake in my bed, listened and trembled. It was dark in the room, and to my excited imagination the serpents were no longer under the floor, but out, gliding hither and thither over it, with uplifted heads in a kind of mystic dance; and I often shivered to think what my bare feet might touch if I were to thrust a leg out and let it hang down over the bedside."
Source:
Far Away and Long Ago: A Childhood in Argentina, W. H. Hudson. Eland Books, 1982, pp.207-208.
The Bonus:
It gets worse. I also happen to be reading Hudson's, Idle Days in Patagonia. Early on in the book Hudson describes an incident when he accidentally shoots himself in the leg and has to wait in a windowless cabin while his friend goes for help. He learns that he is not alone:
"At length, about midnight, I was startled by a slight curious sound in the intense silence and darkness. It was in the cabin and close to me. I thought at first it was like the sound made by a rope drawn slowly over the clay floor. I lighted a wax match, but the sound had ceased, and I saw nothing. After awhile I heard it again, but it now seemed to be out of doors and going round the hut, and I paid little attention to it. It soon ceased, and I heard it no more. So silent and dark was it thereafter that The hut I reposed in might have been a roomy coffin in which I had been buried a hundred feet beneath the surface of the earth. Yet I was no longer alone, if I had only known it, but had now a messmate and bedfellow who had subtly crept in to share the warmth of the cloak and of my person—one with a broad arrow-shaped head, set with round lidless eyes like polished yellow pebbles, and a long smooth limbless body, strangely segmented and vaguely written all over with mystic characters in some dusky tint on an indeterminate grayish-tawny ground...."
[When his friend returns, Hudson learns he has been sleeping with the snake.]
"Not until the sun was an hour up did my friend return to me to find me hopeful still, and with all my faculties about me, but unable to move without assistance. Putting his arms around me he helped me up, and just as I had got erect on my sound leg, leaning heavily on him, out from beneath the poncho lying at my feet glided a large serpent of a venomous kind, the Craspedocephalus alternactus, called in the vernacular the 'serpent with cross.' Had my friend's arms not been occupied with sustaining me he, no doubt, would have attacked it with the first weapon that offered, and in all probability killed it, with the result that I should have suffered from a kind of vicarious remorse ever after. Fortunately it was not long in drawing its coils out of sight and danger into a hole in the wall."
Sources:
'Ophiology' is a sub-field of Herpetology and the Wikipedia entry for that is here. You will learn from this very interesting article that cobras growl: "6 Sssecrets of a Snake-Sound Scientissst," Kate Horowitz, Mental Floss, Sept. 21, 2015.
CANCON
Snakes, lots of them, can be found at the Narcisse Snake Dens which are located about an hour from Winnipeg. "Snakes On A Plain: A Visit to Manitoba's Narcisse Snake Dens: A Bucket List Experience Observing the World's Largest Concentration of Snakes," Robin Esrock, Canadian Geographic, Mar. 2, 2023.
