Two For One
by
Joey Holmes

The day was March 30, 1998, and the air temperature was around 80 degrees F. Although it has been especially warm for several days, snake hunting was getting a slow start. Today my hopes were high, and it looked like I might have some time to hunt.

I started my search around lunchtime and went to several of my favorite spots without any success. My next stop was at a reservoir near Clinton. As I pulled my pickup in behind the dam, I saw a car parked at the end of the road. Nothing odd, people fish here often. I glanced around to find the fishermen. I saw a young man sitting on a rock with his back toward me. Nearby was a girl in her late teens. She was unbuttoning and pulling down her shorts. She saw my truck, made eye contact with me, and then pulled her shorts back up. I shook my head at her as to say, "You shouldn't be doing this." I then turned the truck around and left. I went into town to run a couple of errands and returned to the reservoir about a hour later. The same young couple were now driving out in the "fishing" car. I suppose I didn't bother them too much!

I went into the woods and checked five or six pieces of tin that had been placed there. Nothing. I walked down by the creek, around the fallen trees and rocks. Still nothing. There is an old bridge base which looked very promising. I've been going to this spot over 20 years and the bridge seemed to have been gone forever when I started. But I saw nothing there either.

At the back of the dam is an overflow pipe. The entire volume of the creek flows through this pipe with a great deal of force. The dam builders put rocks, riprap, to prevent severe erosion that would occur if the water just hit the bare earth. Up on the rocks above the water level, I frightened a watersnake which hurled itself into the pool. I took a few more steps and then saw, between two rocks, about 6 inches of watersnake. The peculiar thing was that I was seeing the snake's belly. I've never seen a live snake lying on its back! (Except, of course, a Hognose Snake playing dead.) I have seen shot snakes lying dead in such places, so I figured, here's another one some "butthead" has killed.

I touched the snake with the tip of the snake stick, and it didn't fall apart in decomposition. I reached down and grasped it. It wasn't rotten dead. Why, it even seemed to have a little muscle tone! I tugged at it and the end to my right, the tail end, came right out from under the rock that was covering it. The other end was wedged in tight. I couldn't imagine that the rock had it pinned, so I rolled away the rock directly above it. Movement caught my eye. In front of me was an Eastern Kingsnake engaged in serious constriction around the head and neck of the watersnake. I pulled them both free of the rocks and separated them. I placed them together in the same bag. I walked around a few more minutes and found nothing else of interest. When I got back to the truck, I opened the bag and I'll be darned if the king wasn't back on the watersnake! I separated them again (the watersnake had some value to me in teaching my students at the Wilderness Institute how to use a field guide) and re-bagged them. (Postscript; Since getting them into the classroom, the king has proven to have a very healthy appetite for mice but has since ignored the watersnake.)

I have often imagined that someday I would probably grab a kingsnake with its head in the bushes or a hole, and when I pulled it free it would have a grip on a copperhead or some such venomous snake that may have enough life left in it to give me the fang. I seriously doubt this will ever happen but the experience of that March 30 let me know that even after 36 years I still have plenty of new experiences left to me in the herping world.

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