Caution! These things can hurt you.

That’s a rattlesnake. In the title phrase the operative word is “can”, meaning,  they are able. In other words if they are provoked, cornered, threatened, or attacked they believe in reciprocity and they’re equipped to back it up. But, THEY WOULD RATHER NOT. Given a chance, they will avoid encounters with humans. Dealing with rattlesnakes is a simple matter of letting them do whatever they’re doing. Let ’em be. They’ll leave. I’ve spent over four decades hiking in areas where rattlesnakes live and I can count the number of encounters I’ve had with them on my fingers without using all ten. This one was no different: I went my way, he/she went his/hers. Simple. Safe. Effective. By the way, do you know how to tell a boy snake from a girl snake? Trick question! Doesn’t matter!

Rattlesnake
Rattlesnake

Here’s a different angle on our dangerous friend.

Snake on Granite
Snake on Granite

The rocks between which this fellow is hiding are large granite boulders. If you’ve studied granite at all you know it comes in a million colors. You should also know that once granite becomes granite it stays that way for a very long time. You and I could safely assume that since granite is the way it is the granite boulders on which this snake is sunning itself have looked pretty much the way they appear now since before humans, or rattlesnakes existed. Notice the complex colors in the granite? The little black specks peppered throughout it? If it weren’t for the outlines of its scales the snake and the granite would be nearly indistinguishable. Evolution, in its painfully slow and equally ruthless way,  has made sure that only rattlesnakes the color of this granite survive here. Obvious. Right? But that leads me to an even stranger thought: What if we humans had been trapped on a world of granite boulders like these and had to live among them for our survival, and it went on that way generation after generation for, say, a million years or so. Would our skins be the color of this snake’s? And if all men were the same color, more or less, would they see themselves as brothers? And if all men were brothers would you let one marry your sister?

PP

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