Prompt 4 Great Snakes!

It's a kind of heat that suffocates you where wind blows dust in your eyes and whistles, but the desolation of the desert it ruptured by a rattle.  There are no cribs or playpens in sight and the first instinct is to run, but that's the worst thing you could. Stand still and search all around you at your feet, study the pile of rocks only a few feet away until you see movement on the rock ledge, but you still shouldn't make any sudden movements when you're in the home of the Western Diamondback Rattlesnake.

I've always loved reptiles, but I would have to say that my favorite would be rattlesnakes.  We have timber rattlers and copperheads in Pennsylvania, but we don't the beauty and fear inspired by the diamond pattern and the black and white banded tail just below the rattle.  Our snakes are boring by comparison.

When I was eleven, my parents took me away from building a tree house with my friends and a fairly successful little league season to head out west in a mini-van and the only thing I had to get me through the aforementioned boyhood milestones were the promises that we'd get to see all kinds of wildlife. I was strong into my snake phase then and what I wanted almost as much as I feared was to be out hiking and hear that rattle.  I wanted to see a diamondback up close.  For some reason, this was my ideal of the west with it's expansive deserts and I'd seen it so many times on tv that I just wanted something cool I could tell my friends when I got back (I didn't think Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands, the Grand Canyon or any other national treasure were worthy of tree house stories...it had to be something better).

I eventually did get to see my snake, but it was behind glass at a reptile house in Arizona and none to pleased about its regular meals or audience.  I like different things about the snake now than I liked then, but as I stood there, a little closer to the glass than my parents would have liked, I watched its tail wagging violently, but not like a dog.  The black and white strips just below the rattle blurred a little as it reared up into the S-curve that I learned means it's about to strike, but I could move and I'm fortunate the glass was between us because I don't know if I would have moved in the wild.  It was hypnotic and I was transfixed in a way I haven't been since.

I can still see it and it thrills me.  I was frightened, but couldn't look away.  I still love these animals, I've watched specials about them being milked so that their venom can be turned into anti-venin.  I've had dreams about falling into a winter den of western diamondbacks, I've been bitten, I've gotten sick, but I keep coming back to them in my dreams.  That coiling S returns to my mind and for me represents the west with its barren hostility.

I feel a certain kinship with these snakes. They are coarse and dry. They warn you before the strike, but don't hesitate to make you pay for ignoring their warning and then they slide away.  I always though of them as solitary animals, but once a year they come together to hibernate and I feel this way about my best friends.  We too can be venomous, but once a year we must get together and share our vertical slit stares and warn the rest of the world that when we're released back into the wild, we're hungry and ornery and ready to strike.

My scales are bristling.  I missed out on hibernation this year and the exhaustion leaves my tail with an incessant rattle.  Hikers beware.  I'm curled up on my ledge soaking up the sun when I can and waiting for the next thing to invade my space to strike.  I'm not spiteful and hateful by nature, but given the opportunity, I can play that role now that indifference has evolved into deep rooted seething and frustration.  I'm hungry.