Postscript: Snakes In The Grass

      That bite while on a creek hike wasn’t my last run in with venomous snakes. When my children were little our beloved black and tan laid down on the woodland path ahead  and started licking her hind leg. She refused to stand up so I had to carry the lanky ninety-pound hound a half mile to our blue Isuzu Trooper. By the time we drove the five-miles home from the Greenbrier State Forest her lower leg had ballooned to loaf-sized and the fur was licked off to reveal the two red marks and proximal vein streaks characteristic of a pit viper bite. She continuously licked the useless leg as we force-fed her diphenhydramine and water, all the while praying for her recovery and thankful it wasn’t five-year old Jacob or two-year-old Ella, who'd been next in line on the trail. On the third dawn the now-skinnier coon hound limped to the dog door and went out to pee. The fur on that leg never grew back.

     Twenty years later our big, goofy Maine coon cat disappeared for three days. We’d nearly given up on finding him after searching the property, nearby woods, and roadside ditches when he came limping home looking all bedraggled and with a swollen hind leg. It took a few days of care and a round of antibiotics before he resumed his hide-and-seek antics. Now the absence of fur and muscle on that leg is only visible after his spring grooming (see photo above).

     There are two poisonous snakes in this part of the Mountain State. The timber rattlesnake makes nests and winter dens in rocky upland forests. It's bite can be fatal, killing with hemorrhagic (blood thinning) and neurotoxic (paralyzing) venom. Eastern copperheads live in more diverse habitats including aquatic where they catch fish with a hemotoxic bite that disrupts red blood cells to destroy surrounding tissues. Our black and tan hound and Maine coon cat were probably bitten by copperheads since they both survived with localized tissue damage.

     A couple of weeks after my snake bite I was gathering flower tops from a recently brush-hogged field about fifty yards from the creek on the opposite side from my cabin. Beneath the red clover and yarrow I glimpsed a three-foot-long snake. After leaping back, I found a stout limb and used it to lift the apparently lifeless viper, revealing several gashes on its umber-spotted body. I carried it hanging limp over the branch to the little footbridge, coiling it down onto a large flat rock sitting just above the flowing water. The next dawn, when I walked over that wooden span on the way to my office in town, the copperhead was gone.