While walking a local dirt road, our elder male lab Jasper poked his head into some roadside vegetation. Never one to pass up a sniff of a well-aged elk bone, or a spritz of coyote urine or scat, Jasper’s behavior initially raised no alarm—not even after I walked past him, hearing what I thought was the rattling, rolling buzz of a cicada in the grass (Click below to hear cicada sound).
Something made me pause, though. I took a step back—feeling like something was a little out of place. I realized the buzz sounded a bit loud, like one really BIG cicada….Sure enough, looking down over Jasper’s back and outstretched nose I could see the coiled body and raised head of a prairie rattlesnake just inches away. Grabbing him by the hind legs at the hips, I quickly drug him backward and out of harm’s way.
It was a beautiful snake, colored in a sandy ochre-yellow with darker, brownish markings all down its back. While we know that these characters are out here and are happy they are, encountering one with your clueless Labrador definitely gets the blood pumping. Many people would kill this neighbor of ours out of fear, or a sense of duty, but I can’t help feel that the snake didn’t choose to be born a snake just as we have not chosen our own ethnicity, place of birth, etcetera. To persecute a person, a prairie rattlesnake, a wolf, or anything for simply being what they are makes little sense. Part of what makes living in a wild place like Yellowstone so rewarding is learning to adjust our habits in order to coexist with all of our neighbors.
Young George and I took a few final, appreciative looks at the snake from a respectful distance and finished the walk. Having marked the spot where our darling serpent lay, we gave it wide berth on the return. We arrived home home no worse for the experience, and feeling if anything, enriched and grateful.