"We Have Rattlesnakes"

(Page 2 of 3)

I haven't yet set foot inside the coliseum, but the action has already begun. There's a barbecued brisket and chicken cook-off near the parking lot; a gun, coin, and knife show; a flea market; carni­val rides; and stands selling barbe­cued corn, deep-fried Twinkies, and more. Inside, there's a snake-meat eating contest, and scores of vendors sell food and curios made from rat­tlesnake skin: cell phone and snuff-can holders, iPod cases, belts, boots (useless for ranch work, I'm told), golf putters, bikinis, earrings. There are also entire snakes -- freeze-dried, coiled, yet somehow still threaten­ing. Volunteers from the Children's Christian Ministry paint kids' faces, and at a military recruiting booth, soldiers wearing T-shirts that read "U.S. Marines strike if provoked" encourage children to do chin-ups.

The live snakes are also inside. Roundup participants collect them for months leading up to the event, and when the snakes arrive at the coliseum, they're poured from their crates into a holding pit, where a red-vested Jaycee stirs the lot so they don't suffocate. Dead ones are tweezed from a pile of thousands; for them, the ride ends here. From the holding pit, snakes move on to the "research" pit, where they're sexed and measured. From there it's off to the milking pit, where venom is gathered for medical research, including studies of tumor growth and heart disease. Next stop is the butcher pit, where snakes are decapitated; a bucket on the floor contains their still-seething heads. The last stop on the assembly line is the skinning station, where men in bloodied white jumpsuits suspend twitching snakes by their tails and flay them. The bodies are then deep-fried and eaten. Skins are tanned, perhaps to return as a golf putter at a future event.

People crowd around the various booths and snake pits. As I ap­proach what's now called the education pit (formerly known as the snake-handling pit), I hear the voice of Susan King, the first woman elected to the Texas House of Representatives from Nolan and Taylor counties. "There's no place I'd rather be than a rattlesnake roundup," she yells from the center of the pit; the crowd applauds enthusiasti­cally. Around her, 50 or 60 sluggish diamondbacks huddle at the periphery of the pit. As King answers questions from the audience about school prayer and high school steroid testing, a Jaycee pushes back a snake with the edge of his boot; the diamondback disappears into the depths of an ophidian knot. When King has finished speak­ing, another Jaycee, to the delight of the crowd, prods a snake to strike at a yellow balloon.

More than a few visitors wear press credentials; a film crew from Taiwan commandeers the space in front of the skinning booth, where a Korean merchant from Dallas collects blood and gall bladders from a string of rattlesnakes hung by their tails. Two boys, about 11 years old, press against the Taiwanese crew and provide their own enthu­siastic commentary.

"What's that?"

"A gall bladder."

"Awesome! What's a gall bladder?"

"I don't know."

The western diamondback, Crotalus atrox -- atrox is Latin for frightful, and Crotalus, the larger of the two rattlesnake genera, is from the Greek crotala, or castanet -- is easy to recognize: a series of black and white rhomboids (the snake's signature diamonds) runs the length of its back; each eye is framed in white.

The muscle that shakes the rattle is richly endowed with blood and oxygen and capable of sustained contraction, like the human heart muscle. The rattle itself is made of keratin, just like a fingernail, and is little more than a piece of unshed tail skin, hollow and musical when shaken. Every time a rattlesnake sheds, a new segment is added to the rattle, though the length of the chain is not actually an indication of the snake's age. The more a snake eats, the more it sheds, and a diamondback, forged in the boom-and-bust cycle of arid lands, can go without food for more than a year. Rattles are fragile and curve up to reduce wear and tear; they even pop on and off like snap-on beads. A naturalist friend of mine once knocked the rattle off a snake he was examining and then snapped it back on upside down. He quickly caught the snake and made the necessary adjustment.

In spring, western diamondbacks joust for love, each male attempt­ing to rise up above the other -- leaning, pushing, straining against its rival, face pointed skyward. Tallest snake wins. The female chooses the victor and mates, an entwined affair that lasts hours. The female incubates the developing eggs in her oviduct, and in the fall, two to twenty-five snakelets hatch inside their mother's body. Their venom, drop for drop, is more potent than that of their parents.

Babies eat mice; adults eat rabbits, rats, ground squirrels, and occasionally birds, all warm-blooded creatures, whose presence a diamondback detects through heat-sensitive facial pits, richly enervated organs located midway between the eyes and nostrils on either side of the head. From within these pits, an infrared image is projected onto the snake's retinas, where it is overlaid on the visual image transmitted by its optic nerve. A rattlesnake sees a world unknown to man, a world of radiating heat, of warm food and cool hideaways.

Continued...