SYLVA–A friend with a mountainside farm near Waynesville recalls when a couple of Cherokee men came by the house on a Sunday afternoon and asked if they could hunt rattlesnakes on her property.
“Knock yourselves out,” she told them, “I’ve never even seen a copperhead as long as I’ve been here.”
Later, as they passed back through, one held up a full, seething, squirming, buzzing sack.
There’s no shortage of rattlesnake lore in the mountains, nor rattlers themselves, although they’re pretty shy and tend to stick to the high ground. We’re blessed with only one species, the timber rattler, and although that snake is potentially quite dangerous — it’s large, has long fangs and lots of venom — it has a relatively mild disposition.
The Cherokee relationship with the serpent is a complex one.
Eminent anthropologist James Mooney wrote that snakes were perceived as supernaturals by the Cherokee, with intimate ties to the rain and thunder gods.
“The feeling toward snakes is one of mingled mixed fear and reverence,” he wrote, “and every precaution is taken to avoid killing or offending one, especially the rattlesnake.”
That was some 125 years ago, but it’s a feeling that many on the boundary still hold; when rattlers are found close to town, they’re often taken elsewhere and released.
Scots-Irish setters, whose creation myths took a dimmer view of serpents, weren’t so charitable and aren’t to this day. But while that’s bad news for crotalus horridus, it’s good news for us, because it makes for good stories.
There’s a settler’s legend about a family that built its home on a stone outcropping that had a hole in it, and they placed the hearth near the hole so they could use it to get rid of ashes.
In the middle of the night after their first fire, they awoke to a cabin full of rattlers, whose den was down the hole, and who were roused out by the warmth.
Of course there are more recent literary references, including many fine ones in Ron Rash’s recent “Serena”. There, the protagonist, a timber baroness, imports an enormous bird of prey from the far reaches of Russia to deal with rattlers around the logging camp. Later, her murderous sidekick, Galloway, adds adders to his arsenal as he tries to dispense with one of Serena’s many enemies.
In “Cold Mountain”, Charles Frazier wrote this:
“…Finally, after climbing high, up where the black balsams grow, [Stobrod] ran upon a great old timber rattler, laid out on a flat slate to sun. It was not enormous in length, for they do not get terribly long, but it was stouter through the body than the fat part of a man’s arm. The markings on its back had all run together until it was black as a blacksnake, almost. It had grown a set of rattles as long as Stobrod’s index finger. In telling this to Ada he held out the finger and then with the thumbnail of the other hand he marked off a place right at the third knuckle. He said, They was that long. And he snicked the nail repeatedly across the dry skin.
“Stobrod had walked up near the stone and said to the snake, Hey, I aim to take them rattles. The big snake had a head like a fist, and it raised up off the stone and evaluated Stobrod through slitted yellow eyes. It shifted into a part coil, declaring it would rather fight than move. The snake quivered its tail a moment, warming up. Then it went to rattling with a screech so dreadful as to make one’s thinking seize up in all its units.”
Former state legislator Herbert Hyde, of Madison County, had a farm near Hayesville but didn’t get to spend much time there. Still, he made regular trips to Clay County to keep the place up. Once, when he was there mowing, a neighbor asked him why he bothered, since he and his family only got out there every so often.
“I do it for the same reason I got into politics,” Hyde told him, “to protect the children from snakes.”
Here’s a story about a championship rattlesnake hunter in west Texas. Different kind of rattlesnake, different place. Nice pictures, though, and a good piece. The photos I’ve posted here are from a slideshow that accompanies the story. They were taken by Erich Schlegel.
