THE CASE OF THE TIRED SNAKE

by
Liz Kollar

No one would ever have believed me. It looked like an enormous black rubber tire thrown off the wheel of a truck and left in the middle of the dusty country road. In fact, I was sure it was a tire until I got within a few feet of it and saw the malevolent yellow eyes watching me.

I had been up to my usual wanderings, looking for frogs and copperheads near the rocks in back of our cabin at Lake Swannanoa. The sun was blistering hot, just what the snakes liked best here in the Berkshire Valley of New Jersey. Mother and father had gone on their weekly trip to Dover for groceries. My brother Richard was at work with the DuPont Company until the weekend and my oldest sister, Julia was over at the beach working on her tan. The rest of us, my sister Tilly, my brother Theodore and I were hanging around the cabin.

Theodore wasn’t feeling well because he was suffering from something strange called Diabetes and was not going back to work until he felt stronger. It was a sickness we knew very little about and mother had to buy special foods for him, like lots of vegetables and stuff without sugar. He couldn’t even have the jelly doughnuts we all loved so much and this made him kind of angry and depressed.

I’d left Tilly and Theodore at the cabin because I was hoping to find another copperhead snake like we’d found under our cabin where we kept the kerosene for the cooking stove. Father had managed to catch it in a milk bottle and had taken it out to the woods. He said they were all over the place and were very dangerous. I took another milk bottle with me to see if I could catch one too. If I found one, I could let it go by the blueberry bushes. Copperheads loved blueberries and you could always smell them because my brother said they smelled like cucumbers when they were eating the berries. I also planned to be very careful. There was no sense getting bitten, especially by a poisonous snake.

Now, here was this gigantic, black thing that looked like a truck tire lying in the middle of the road. As I cautiously approached it, I stopped dead. Something was wrong. It definitely was not a tire. A tire didn’t have a head and tail, especially a tail that moved ever so slow, and a long forked tongue that flicked ominously in and out. It had to be a snake but obviously not a copperhead. This one seemed awfully tired. It was black as coal and I could see shiny scales all over its body. The belly part was round and fat and the rest of it lay coiled on the dirt topped road like the top of a big question mark while the oval head had two yellow eyes that seemed to watch me in hungry silence. If it had been stretched out, it could easily have been seven or eight feet long…or maybe even more.

My heart raced with excitement. I was afraid to move because those awful eyes looked like they were trying to hypnotize me. I knew he wasn’t poisonous because of the shape of his head but I also knew he could catch me if he wanted to…almost like the snake on the trail leading to the fire tower on the mountaintop the other day. He had actually been only two feet long, and skinny. I’d stepped on the tip of his tail and in trying to escape, he had wound himself around my leg. If I hadn’t been so shocked, it would have been funny. I’d been walking so fast I never even saw him until it was too late. That snake was more scared than I was and unwound itself in a flash. He was gone before anyone else saw what happened. No one believed me of course.

"There you go again," said mother. "You’re just like the boy who was always crying wolf."

I said, "If you had a snake climbing up your leg, you’d yell, too." And I was angry, of course, because I was telling the truth.

That sounded like a fresh remark and my sister Tilly said, "Yeah, Betty. Something is always happening to you. You’ve got some imagination."

Mother said it wasn’t right to tell stories but father winked at me because he was imaginative too, and told us lots of interesting stories. My sister Julia said I was outright lying and that God would be very angry with me.

Now, I wondered, who would believe me about a seven-foot long, enormously fat snake that looked like a truck tire. No one! That’s who.

I tried to call for my brother, Theodore. Maybe he would hear me at the cabin. "Theodore! Theodore!" I yelled as loudly as I could. He was probably asleep on the porch and getting his rest. "Tilly!" I shrieked, keeping my eye on the snake. "A snake! Hurry up!" But Tilly was probably into one of her books and didn’t want to come.

The snake lay absolutely still. I was sure he was playing possum. There were no cars on the road but if he didn’t move soon, one could come along and run over him and I didn’t want him dead. I was in a serious dilemma and I tried calling again, so loud that my throat hurt. Still, no one came.

I wanted someone, anyone, to see this snake…just once, to be believed. I really didn’t make up stories, just exaggerated a bit…sometimes. But, no one came. No one would see this unbelievably enormous snake with its glittering scales and a belly round as a rabbit. Maybe he had swallowed a rabbit, I thought. He was so quiet and so very fat; he was probably digesting the poor little animal.

I couldn’t stand it any longer. "Don’t go away, snake," I whispered, and backed away slowly until I could run safely back to the cabin.

Theodore was in the kitchen eating cake he shouldn’t have been eating because of his Diabetes, and he tried to hide the crumbs when I came tearing into the house, slamming the screen door behind me. "Oh! Theodore, please come see the snake I found." "I told him how big it was and pleaded with him to hurry.

He could be a good sport. "If you don’t tell mother about the cake, I’ll come see your snake," he bargained. I agreed, and slipping on his sneakers, he ran with me back up the trail to the road where I’d seen the snake.

We stood there looking at the empty road. No tired snake! Not even a truck tire! My brother laughed his "I knew it was just your imagination" laugh, and when our parents came home from shopping, I heard the same old admonition about ‘crying wolf’. No one will ever believe you, Betty, if you make up such crazy stories," mother said, looking cross. "God says you shouldn’t lie."

Ah, well. To this day I can see that tired, black snake watching me with his wicked yellow eyes. He must have slithered away as soon as I ran to get my brother.

Maybe, just maybe, he is still somewhere in the woods at Lake Swannanoa. Only by now, I imagine, he must be twenty feet long and fat as a barrel around his middle.

©Liz Kollar2003