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concerning to me,” I said. “We’ve got to get rid of it.”

My friend Harry from the maintenance shop at the plant where I worked as an engineer built me special snake-handling tools—a noose, a hook, a grabber on an eight-foot pipe. I relocated snakes for weeks, but that copperhead was too smart, always disappearing when I went to retrieve the tools. We also tried to catch it with a glue trap, but that didn’t work either.

I want to pause here in my story and say this: We did not want to kill the copperhead. We wanted to move it. And I know that some of you will have a tough time understanding that, but my husband and I both feel that way: We only kill to eat or in self-defense. Sadly, we had failed to relocate the snake, and we felt we had no other choice but to end its life before one of our dogs or us got bitten.

I asked my coworker Richard, a sharpshooter, to help. He came home with me one day during lunch, took aim, fired, and hit it. Bloody, the snake slithered quickly into a gap in the steps. We raised several cross ties with pry bars until Richard said, “Oh Lord, she’s had babies.” There, in translucent sacks, were several young. If you are wondering what it looked like, it was a bit like when people store onions in pantyhose legs, tying knots between each onion.

We kept prying and finally found the mama, dying several cross ties deeper, emitting a strong, musky smell. Richard finished the job. We boxed all the snakes up, secured the box with duct tape, and headed back to work.

We were in a severe drought, and it hadn’t rained in two months. Harry, the maintenance guy, took that box of snakes and draped that dead mama copperhead across a tree limb on the other side of a cul-de-sac. “I was taught that if you hang a dead snake in a tree, it’ll rain,” he told me later that day. “And we sure need rain.”

I drove home just after five o’clock that day and saw dark clouds forming on the horizon. That evening, it didn’t just rain—it poured!

The next morning, Harry showed up at my doorway. “I made it rain,” he said.

Maybe he did. Maybe he didn’t. But it sure makes for an interesting story.