The Copperhead

I call 2006 “The Year of the Great Snake Infestation.” The snakes were everywhere that year, and the truth is, we had brought the snake problem on ourselves.

My husband Gene and I had lived in our house for about seven years by then. Our place sits in the woods of Northwest Georgia, and we’d worked our tails off landscaping our sloping backyard with cross ties and landscape timbers, building stairs down from the deck, and forming a nice little flower bed where I planted four or five dozen strawberry plants. We kept most of our property natural—trees, leaves, rocks—but those timbers gave us access to the backyard.

As the weather warmed that year, I started noticing more snakes. We’d always seen a snake here and there, but this was different. I told my sister on the phone one day, “On any given day, I can pretty much go outside and point to a snake.”

She didn’t believe me until she dropped by unannounced one Saturday. “Show me,” she challenged. I walked her to the backyard and pointed into a gap where our cross ties had settled apart. There slept Mr. Ratsnake, big as you please. Then we climbed a few steps and spotted a small ringed kingsnake in my strawberry bed.

“Why do you have so many?” she asked.

I shrugged, because I didn’t know. Not yet, anyway.

Everything was fine until one day, when I was crouching in my strawberries pulling weeds, and I looked over to see a copperhead resting about two feet from my leg. I screamed and leapt—maybe ten feet high—and that copperhead disappeared down a hole.

That’s when Gene and I had a very serious conversation. Our golden retriever, Daisy, had refused to go in the backyard for weeks. We suddenly understood why. The dozens of lizards that once sunned on our deck rails had vanished. The cross ties were rotting, creating cavities for insects and small rodents. We were feeding birds, attracting mice and rats—and snakes.

“I think we’ve created an all-youcan- eat buffet for snakes in our backyard— the perfect environment for snakes to thrive,” I told Gene that day. But fixing it meant ripping out all that landscaping wood—hundreds of dollars of materials wasted and a lot of backbreaking work.

A week later, that copperhead was sunning on the steps, and I almost stepped on it with my flip-flop. I screamed again and called for my husband, but Gene’s colorblind and couldn’t see the brown and rust snake camouflaged in the leaves. “The fact that you can’t see that snake is very continued from page

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.