Snakes I have known - Arkansas Times

Alan Leveritt

BIG SAM: A rat snake who makes regular appearances on the farm.

Arkansas Times publisher Alan Leveritt has lived on his great-grandparents' farm in North Pulaski County for 40 years. This is the latest in a series of columns about day-to-day life on the land where he raises heirloom tomatoes and other crops for local restaurants and the Hillcrest Farmers Market.

When we rebuilt and moved into this old farmhouse, I thought I owned the place but quickly realized I was just another tenant. There was the spring nest of baby birds behind the bookcase. Or the period when there was a possum living in the HVAC system who would come up into the kitchen each night and eat the cat food. Or the hundreds of red wasps that would suddenly appear every summer, covering the vaulted ceiling of a newly built room. Or the dozen wild turkeys roosting on my back porch one morning, or a whole posse of deadly raccoons that turned my peacock pen into a melee of blood and beautiful feathers. 

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With the exception of a few rats and the occasional raccoon in the attic, city dwellers have done their best to evict wild things. But if you live in the country, get ready to share the road with Mother Nature. She's not going anywhere. 

Consider the snakes.

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When my grandmother was a small child on our farm, not a blade of grass was permitted to grow around the log house. Ma, my great-grandmother, kept a swept yard, a common country practice back then to help spot poisonous snakes before the children got into them. Doctors were far away. My grandmother Leveritt outside of Smackover kept a swept yard as well.

Snakes at my place tend to come in waves. First it seemed they were all copperheads, then speckled king snakes and now big black rat snakes with a sprinkling of cottonmouth water moccasins throughout. And my reaction to them has also varied, depending on the species and, oddly, where I was at that time in my life.

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When we moved out to the farm, the old house, never in good shape, had been abandoned for 25 years. It already had plenty of tenants. Regarding snakes, I came across nothing but copperheads for the first eight or nine years. People will disagree but in my experience copperheads are not particularly aggressive. 

I had only been gardening for a couple of seasons and it seemed I grew mostly weeds in my small kitchen garden. One morning I had been weeding on all fours, trying to make room for some fall tomatoes. Headed to the compost with an arm full of weeds, I returned to discover a copperhead curled up exactly where I had been pulling weeds. He could have had me a dozen times. I called my stepson to bring his .410 and we severed the snake's head with shot. Curious and not knowing any better I picked up the snake's head by what was left of its neck. Suddenly his mouth flew open with his fangs extended, spurting venom everywhere. That is how I learned that a snake is never dead until it is. 

Paw planted a stand of elephant garlic where my kitchen garden is now sometime around 1920 and the garlic has proliferated there ever since. The garlic heads get up to a pound in size, thus their name. Before fire ants arrived I always gardened in comfortable, open-toed sandals. One evening in late June I was harvesting the huge garlic heads, yanking the plants up through the thatch and pitching them to the side. It wasn't until I was nose to nose with a very surprised copperhead that I realized that one had been lying under the thatch up against the thick stem of the plant. When I yanked it up with some force, he rode the top of the garlic head almost even with my chin until he slipped off and fell across my feet. I hollered and went high-stepping through the bush beans while he disappeared into the potatoes. Those potatoes liked to never get harvested that year. 

At this point my attitude started to change. The snake could have had me and didn't. I figured I owed the copperheads and stopped killing them, gently moving them aside or avoiding them when I encountered one. 

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But all of that changed in 2000 when my daughter, Lila Dell, was born. One May afternoon I was trying to nap in the loft with my windows open. Lila was about 2 and had wandered outside and began calling, "Daddy, come see the snake!" I was nearly asleep and at first it didn't register, but then it did. I was down the stairs and out back in seconds to find her poking a copperhead with a short stick. I grabbed her and returned with a hoe and killed the snake. 

The last close encounter with copperheads was for me the scariest. Again, it wasn't the snake's fault, but you can't afford to anthropomorphize a reptile. My in-laws were in town and we returned late to the farm from dinner. I was holding Lila and had opened the screen door and the front door for her grandmother when I heard a panicky Ana Lou say, "Snake, snake, snake!"

The cats had brought a copperhead up on the front porch and the snake had sought refuge between the screen door and the main door. When I opened the door for Ana Lou, the copperhead slithered right into the living room ahead of her.

My sophisticated Richmond in-laws were going to be so impressed, especially when I moved all of us into the Jacksonville Comfort Inn until I found the damn snake. I handed Lila to her grandmother and told her not to take her eyes off of the snake while I went for the hoe. The snake, instead of going under the sofa, had coiled up next to a bookcase. I raised the hoe and thought, this better work or it was going to be a very weird weekend. I caught the snake right behind its head. He was still hissing and trying to bite as his head whizzed by my foot out onto the porch. 

That spring saw an influx of speckled king snakes and the near disappearance of copperheads. King snakes are impervious to snake venom and prey on copperheads. When my dad was a student at Arkansas A&M at Monticello during the 1930s, members of his biology class were sent out to collect snake specimens. Pretty quickly he had filled his pillow case with a copperhead and a king snake, confident that his professor was going to be impressed. But when he returned to the lab and opened the pillowcase, there was only a king snake. The king snake had crushed and completely swallowed the copperhead.

It has been several years since I have seen a king snake but we seem covered up now with black rat snakes. I have a thick, 5-foot-long rat snake I named Big Sam who I encounter every spring. Last year I stood fascinated as he climbed 25 feet straight up a magnificent white oak to reach the first limb where he curled up in the crook, waiting, I suppose, for a bird. I recalled some years back a herpetologist tagged a bunch of rattlesnakes to follow their movements. At one point he thought his tracking devices had malfunctioned or the snakes disappeared. In fact they were all up in trees. 

Speaking of trees, I once saw a marriage end on the Spring River after a couple spotted a big writhing ball of cottonmouths having snake sex on a limb overhanging the river. The guy, with a huge camera around his neck, had gotten out of the back of the canoe and was waist deep in the water snapping photographs. Holding on to the canoe as he got closer and closer to the ball of snakes, he was apparently unaware that his wife who was in the front of the canoe was about 6 feet closer to the snakes than he was. His wife was getting panicky, her voice rising with every step closer until she was nearly beneath the ball. That's when the dozen snakes became aware of them and literally exploded into the air and into the water. Suddenly surrounded by snakes, it was the husband's turn to panic and he sort of jump-flopped into the back of the canoe, flipping his now hysterical wife into the Spring River and in amongst all the cottonmouths. That was the last we saw of them as we rounded a willow bend.

I live about 300 yards uphill from Bayou Meto, and the closer you get to the water, the bad snake census switches from copperhead to cottonmouth. I once had a neighbor who had lost his leg below the knee to a drunk driver, but he had a high tech metal prosthesis which allowed him a nearly normal lifestyle. One afternoon he was helping us with some sheep fencing near the bayou. He had just gotten off his four-wheeler when he felt a strange repetitive vibration coming up his injured leg. When he looked down, he saw he was standing on the midsection of a very angry cottonmouth which was repeatedly striking his prosthesis. As long as he was standing on the snake he was pretty safe; it was his next move that could be problematic. He was a big man but he grabbed the four-wheeler handlebars and launched himself over the machine, landing on the other side. Both he and the snake then took off in different directions. 

My scariest, most unsettling encounter with a water moccasin involved the largest snake that I have ever seen outside of a zoo. There is an old trace road that goes in front of my house and down the hill to a ford on Bayou Meto where wagons and horses could cross. Normally it is just a few inches deep, and it's where I kept my canoe pulled up for fishing. 

One summer afternoon I came across a huge snake there, hunting crawfish in the shallow ford. He was as big around as my calf, too thick to ever be completely submerged and whipping around like a sea serpent as he chased his prey. His triangle- shaped head was as big as my open palm and I watched him until he got his fill and disappeared into the green depths of Bayou Meto. 

A year later I was anchored and fishing in my nearby honey hole when I saw him again, perfectly still, wrapped around a Tupelo stump near the bank. About 4 feet of the stump was out of the water and the cottonmouth was so big I could see little of the stump. I paddled over to the bank and walked back until I was standing above the snake. He became aware of me and ever so slowly began to unwind around the stump, slowly swimming toward the other bank. And this is where I have been accused of daytime drinking but I swear, by the time the tip of his tail left the stump, his nose was almost touching the other bank.

The final time I encountered the snake was the creepiest. Newt Williamson, my grandmother's third cousin and my good neighbor, had died and his cattle had been sold off. Newt ran his cattle partially on our land and they kept the bamboo eaten down and trampled around the ford. It had been a year since he died and it was hard to see where I was stepping for all the new growth. I was putting in my canoe when I saw him, his gaze seemingly fixed on me. He was coiled up in the bamboo not 15 feet away, a huge stack of snake flesh. Maybe for the first time in my life I felt in danger while in the woods. I quickly put the canoe between the two of us and then eased the boat out into the water. I paddled 75 yards down the bayou and tried to fish for an hour, but I was dreading the return. Quietly I paddled back up to the ford waiting for him to appear in his spot until I realized he was no longer there. He had moved and I could not see where. I was scared. Bob Lancaster, one of the great Arkansas writers in my lifetime and a former editor of the Times, told a hair-raising story once of a cottonmouth hunting a Sheridan fisherman. In Honduras I had listened to a farmer tell the story of a Bushmaster tracking another farmer back to his village. For the first time in my life I could imagine what it felt like to be prey.

It took me a half-hour just to pull up the canoe and navigate the 20 yards of undergrowth that covered the ford. He was either there or in the water and I gave it 50-50. I never saw him again, but every year when I go down to the bayou I look for him. He will always be there for me.