The Rattler’s Tale
Ragged clouds passed from in front of the full moon as Raven slid from the shadows of the rocks into the clearing before the cave mouth. She froze in the sudden, wan light and listened intently, her head cocked, her eyes darting from shadow to shadow. Her stance was so motionless she seemed inanimate. In the feeble light that washed over the barrenness of the desert, she might have been a young Joshua tree. Then, on the farthest fringe of her hearing, she detected the frail rasp of scales on sand. Her still shadow stretched across the desert floor to where the boulders piled atop one another in the darkness, and, from out of her shadow’s head, she saw a subtle movement. Raven strained to decipher the vague motion, but it was difficult, like watching a ropy wisp of smoke rise into heavy mist. Just as she realized what this mirage was, it glided across her bare foot and wound itself into a thick coil. The viper flicked its tongue in and out of the triangular wedge of its head as it scrutinized the corners of the night. Raven smiled.
“You can stand guard for me, Long One,” she whispered, “in case they return before I am finished.”
In immediate obedience, the serpent raised up as if to strike, its forked tongue busy as it tasted the shadows that ringed the clearing. Raven groped her way into the blackness of the cave entrance, and she remained silent, even when she barked her shin on an upturned wooden box. She reached down and ran her nimble fingers over the provisions scattered on a low makeshift table. Working as if she were blind, she discovered the odd details that filled the meager spare time of the miners: the rough corncob of a homemade pipe, the pungent suede of a tobacco pouch, the delicate filigree of a pocket watch, a necklace strung with rough beads, the cold, crimped roundness of blasting caps, a large hairy ball. Raven snatched back her hand. Very slowly she extended her fingertips back toward the thing. She almost giggled out loud as her touch ferreted out the meaning of the hairy object. It was the knotted, frayed end of a thick rope. She continued her sightless search of the table top until her hand brushed against the nearly weightless cube of the matchbox. Beside it she felt the cool glass globe of the lantern.
With the lantern lighted, she turned to survey the rest of the rude shelter. Three crude beds had been fashioned from knotty planks supported by powder kegs. Straw spilled out of lumpy burlap mattresses. A tattered sheet covered the opening that led deeper into the mine. As Raven drew nearer, she could see, in the flickering light, that the sheet was printed with tiny bouquets of roses. She took a deep breath and threw back the curtain. The shaft sloped steeply down from where she stood and was supported by huge timbers. There were so many hewn beams lining the passageway that Raven fancied these men had tunneled into a mountain of oak. Deep within the splintery corridor she could hear the echoes of the pops and creaks as the mountain settled down on the wooden supports. When she turned back to the cave opening, fine sand sifted down into her hair.
Raven went to each of the kegs which supported the rude beds and rapped them with her knuckles, but they all rang hollow. She overturned the table and a stack of crates which served as a bureau as she searched for blasting powder. She kicked over a rocking chair and, with a great sweep of her arm, littered the cave floor with the pipe, tobacco, watch and necklace. But, as she watched these paltry treasures scatter onto the floor, she realized that the necklace was not strung with beads, but with human teeth. Raven ripped down the rose-printed sheet and stomped it into the dirt. Her eyes welled with tears as she trampled the sheet, but, as she spun with the lantern at arm’s length, she glimpsed a small barrel tucked between the timbers a few yards down the shaft. She knelt beside the cask, and, as she tried to pull it into the open, a pungent liquid sloshed onto her hand. Raven gingerly held her fingers to her nose and recognized the acrid smell of kerosene. Placing the lantern outside the cave, she returned and wrestled the keg up and splashed the wooden walls of the passageway. She continued to spatter the walls as she slowly backed out of the corridor, and she emptied the barrel on the primitive bedding.
Raven withdrew from the reeking confines of the cave to where the rattlesnake lay coiled at attention. A breeze had lifted through the rocks, and the cool wind refreshed her although the cloying stench of kerosene still clung, and she could feel her skin beginning to burn under her damp shirt. She grasped the lantern and, without hesitation, lofted it deep into the cavern. It burst in the throat of the shaft, and flames raced out toward her the way that, in still water, a wave rings out from the place a pebble has broken the surface and gone under. A blast of heat blew past her as the flames halted at the cave mouth and clawed angrily at the desert night. Raven staggered back a few steps and shielded her face with her arm. It was if some enraged mythical beast were howling fire from the blaze of its lair.
Raven turned her back on the inferno and gazed out into the desert below the rocks, but she could see nothing because the fire still burned in her retinas. The after-image, the ghost, of the flames floated through the blackness even though the sky had cleared and the moon was bright. The rattlesnake skimmed past her ankles and spiraled himself into a sentry position. Raven stared at the place, just below the cave mouth, below the jumbled boulders, where her father rested. As the specter of the fire faded from her vision, she began to see the wooden poles of the sacred platforms, bleached bone white in the fullness of the moon. The spindly staves held up, toward the sky, the remains of the great men and women of her tribe. These platforms were their eternal berths, their memorials, the places where they could finally speak with their fathers and their father’s fathers. Here they rejoined the circular spirit of the earth, neither young nor old, strong nor feeble, cunning nor simple. Here they became one with the land and the sky and the waters. They transformed into spirit, like the wind or the morning mists that caressed the face of the world.
Raven knew that her father was here because he was a great artist with the skins of snakes. He alone had been able to craft the narrow hides into scabbards and sheaths and ceremonial covers for the hallowed long pipes. Many chiefs had sought his talent for fashioning the rattling ornaments for their war bonnets. They knew that her father would only use the longest rattles from the oldest snakes so that when the chiefs danced around the harvest fires the children would run to their mothers to get their feet out of the sand.
Raven remembered the way her father would wait, hunkered near the hole of a snake nest for hours, gently singing his prayer for the spirit of the snake that burrowed there. When the rattler would finally emerge, her father would respectfully ask permission from the serpent to use his skin, and then thank the snake as he gently cradled the reptile, still alive, into his leather bag. No one had ever seen how her father would kill the snakes, not even Raven nor her mother, and, when asked, her father would only smile and speak of the nobility and courage of the rattlesnake. As her father had lay dying, he had called Raven to his side and told her, ÔThe rattlesnake has taken good care of me in my lifetime. They will take care of you as well. Do not be afraid, and they will be your companions. They will protect you.’
Raven felt the familiar, long stroke of the silky dry scales as the rattler glided past her bare instep. She turned back to the blaze and was satisfied when she heard a coaling timber snap. From out of the mine came a shower of fist-sized embers and a roiling cloud of dust. She could hear the rumble of boulders collapsing into the shaft. Turning back to face the refreshing breeze, Raven again saw the after-image of the flames scour the center of wherever she looked, but there seemed to be more flames, shaped differently, thin and spiky, dancing up from a hard ball of fire, when she gazed again at the burial ground. As the mirage of flame faded from her sight, she realized she was seeing a different fire, a real fire, two real fires moving shakily up through the hallowed biers of her ancestors. Raven could now hear, above the flapping crackle of the cave-fire, the panting grunts of three men as they scrambled up the rocks toward the cave. The rattlesnake twitched and jerked between her feet, first in one direction and then another.
A man stumbled from between the boulders to Raven’s left, much nearer than she expected. In the wild, flickering light of the fire and the torch he waved before him, she could see the savage squint of his eyes, the matted path of drool which coursed from the corner of his mouth down his long, dirty beard. She feinted as if to run past the man, but he spread his arms wide and brandished his torch.
“Silas! Samuel! Lookee here,” the man cackled, “I think I caught me a fire-bug. Let’s see...”
The man went silent the second he saw the rattler coiled between Raven’s feet. He stood perfectly still with his mouth opening and closing, as if he were trying to speak. He began to take a step backward, but, before his hind foot had even a chance to touch the ground, the snake had propelled itself toward him through the clearing, a diamondback arrow. The rattler’s head hit the man at the place where his beard met his chest, and the force of the strike thrust the fangs up under the beard to the pale flesh of the throat. The miner threw his hands into the air and staggered in a circle. His head twitched back and forth. The rattler looked like a writhing necktie as the man fell backward and began to convulse in rapid spasms.
Raven did not have a chance to flee over the shuddering form of the stricken miner before the second man leaped from between two boulders and clamped her arm above the elbow with an iron grip. Raven spun to loosen herself from his hold, and the vigor of her action threw him off balance. He pulled her to the ground with him as he fell before the blazing mouth of the cave. As the man struggled to his feet, still gripping Raven’s arm, the rattler struck him in the right eye. With the man’s horrified face nearly in her own as they wrestled in the sand, Raven could see how the rattlesnake’s fangs had entered the flesh above the eyebrow and exited in the crepey skin of the eyelid. The man grappled with the serpent, his both hands not large enough to go all the way around the rattler where he gripped its middle, and he finally, with a strength induced by panic, ripped the snake from his brow. Blinded by blood and venom, he lurched sideways, his fists covering his eyes until he careened headlong into the licking flames of the mine.
Raven staggered to her feet and stumbled across the clearing as hideous shrieks from the cave’s inferno echoed through the night. Raven was nearly to a notch between the rocks that ringed the clearing when a heavy weight fell on her from behind. Her breath knocked out of her, she impotently struggled to wriggle from beneath the third miner. He was a huge man, fat and sweaty, and his beard felt like a tumbleweed as it scratched her cheek. Raven managed to turn over, but her legs were still pinned beneath his massive chest. His hot, whiskey-fraught breath panted in her face, and he grinned wildly at her, his eyes small and close-set, the eyes of a pig. The screams from the flames had ceased, and Raven heard the familiar, dizzily frenzied sizzle of the snake’s rattle.
The obese miner heard it too. He scrambled around with his back to the rocks and hugged Raven in front of him. She was a ridiculously small shield for his filthy girth, but he also wore a pair of furry chaps, and he pulled his knees up so that his shins, and the hairy hide that covered them, hid them from a direct strike. Between the fat man’s knees, Raven could see the rattler sway back and forth, looking for a place to sink his fangs into the corpulent flesh. For what seemed like an aching eternity in the flickering light of the clearing, the snake swayed as the miner huddled against the rocks, keeping Raven between himself and the undulating serpent. The rattler struck with a speed and ferocity which surprised even Raven. Instinctively, the fat miner brought up his huge knees to shield his face, and the snake, its elastic jaw unhinged wide, bit down into the woolly leather of the miner’s chaps. The rattler sank its hollow, venomous fangs as deeply as it could, but the leather was thick and the wool heavy. The death-bite could not penetrate the chaps, and worse, Raven realized as the rattler writhed helplessly, his fangs were embedded in the leather like an axe in a green log. The fat man unsheathed his long knife and brought it down on the snake in one fluid movement. The first slash sliced into the rattler’s spine. Then the knife-blade severed ribs and entrails in a razor-sharp sweep again and again. The last slash rent the shredded body from the rattler’s head, still stuck tight in the leather of the leggings. As the headless carcass writhed on the ground by the miner’s boot, Raven, for the first time, cried out.
The fat man kicked open the door of the cabin and heaved Raven inside, sending her tumbling against the stone hearth. She bumped her head on the front ledge, and, when she raised both her hands, bound with a rawhide thong, to her forehead, she felt the sticky dampness of blood. The miner slammed the door shut, and the inside of the room was as dark as a cave. Raven heard his wheezing pant coming closer and closer to her in the darkness. Then he stopped. Raven jerked her head from the sudden brightness of a match being struck, and , in the sputtering light, she saw his jowls tighten from his toothless grin as he lit the kerosene lamp on the mantle. He flicked the match, still lit, from between his thumb and forefinger at Raven, and it bounced off of the damp leather of her shirt. As she frantically stamped out the match and slapped at her chest, the fat man cackled.
He ambled to the table in the center of the room and slumped heavily into a rickety chair. Wheezing, he shucked off the chaps and pulled one foot up onto his knee and tugged the boot off of his dirty bare foot. Raven watched him without blinking as he tugged off the other boot and arranged both of them carefully beside the table. The air in the tiny cabin began to stink.
“So, you thought you could burn us out, huh?” the fat man chortled. “You thought that we’d see all that mess and just decide to pack up and leave forever.”
The fat man leaned back in the chair and squinted at Raven with one eye. He loosened the leather tie on a pouch he carried slung below his huge waist and raised the flap, resting his hand inside.
“I think you got it all wrong, Baby Injun. I think all you did was get yourself into a heap of trouble.”
From the pouch he pulled out a corncob pipe and a leather tobacco pouch. He placed them carefully on the table.
“What did we do to put you on the war path, Pocahontas?”
With a great effort, he crossed his legs and scratched the dirty yellow sole of his foot.
“Was it that pitiful bone-yard up there by the claim you was protecting?”
He slipped his hand back into the pouch and retrieved another necklace strung with human teeth.
“These are all I ever took. Just pick up a skull and shake it real hard. These teeth just fall out like seed corn out of a basket. These funny-lookin’ Injun teeth.”
“You disrespect the honored ones, their spirit,” Raven hissed as she blinked back hot tears.
“You disrespect me, little girl, and you’re going to be sorry you ever did that.”
Raven spit at the fat man and then raised both bound hands to wipe spittle from her chin. The miner chuckled softly and slipped hid hand back into the pouch.
“You’re too feisty for your own good. You got nothing protecting you now.”
The fat man slowly slid his hand out of the pouch and held it out toward Raven so that she could see what rested in his palm.
“You see. Nothing.”
In the wavering light of the kerosene lamp Raven saw the head of the rattler, its jaws spread wide in its fatal attempt to pierce the leather of the chaps.
“What’s he see now, Pocahontas? Let me put him up here so he can see what I’m going to do to you.”
The fat man carefully placed the wide-jawed skull on the edge of the table, arranging it so that the dull eyes looked at the place where she lay in front of the hearth.
“I don’t want to disrespect his...”
The fat man went silent and glanced abruptly over his shoulder. Raven listened too. On the farthest fringe of her hearing she detected the frail rasp of scales on sand. The fat man reached for the knife in his belt and unsheathed it.
“Spirit,” Raven whispered, finishing the fat man’s sentence.
“Shh...”
The fat man sat up straight and half-turned in the chair. Another sound faintly insinuated itself in the predawn stillness of the room. The sound was small, but it seemed to be coming from every direction. It was a distant sizzle, like a swarm of cicadas heard from across an open field. The fat man cocked his head, his eyes going wide. The sizzle grew louder, frenzied, until it sounded as though a hundred angry rattlers plagued the dirt surrounding the cabin. The fat man sprang to his feet, nearly upsetting the table. The pipe, tobacco, and the rattler’s head were toppled from their careful arrangement on the table top.
The fat man paced the room, listening in one corner and then another. Raven frantically studied the floorboards for the place where the rattler’s head had fallen, but it was nowhere to be seen. The fat man nervously passed the knife from one hand to the other as he strode from the door to the table and back again. The dizzying sizzle of a thousand rattles glutted the room. The fat man held his palms to his ears, and his mouth worked open and shut, in a soundless scream. A terrified field mouse scurried across the floor of the cabin, over the fat man’s bare foot. Unnerved, the fat man snatched up one boot and thrust it on.
The seething racket ceased. The room once again was deadly hushed. Raven, bewildered, looked up at the stricken grimace contorting the fat man’s face. He fell back into the chair, and, with agonizing slowness, tenderly slid the brogan from his bare foot. There, from where it had fallen into the boot, was the rattler’s head, the fangs sunk their full length into the flesh of the fat man’s heel.