![]() The shy sidewinder my love and I met on a moonlit walk last year might have been of the Mohave or the Sonoran subspecies I failed to remember to count whether it had 21 or 23 scales in each row, and the moonlight was insufficient to determine whether its basal rattle bore a black patch or dark brown. Of the eight species or subspecies of pit viper one can reasonably expect to see in the California desert, I lack but three on my life list, if one counts only individual buzzworms whom I managed to identify conclusively. But those meetings have been respectably biodiverse. ![]() Of confirmed meetings with rattlesnakes I have had distressingly few, only a mere dozen or so, perhaps more if one counts the handful of sometimes half-imagined rattlings from beneath the cover of various low-lying creosotes or mats of Russian thistle. This most refined of creatures, pure of heart and intention, pacific by nature, unencumbered by ambition of any rococo profusion of limbs, seeking only sufficient warmth, the occasional unwary surplus rodent, and the even more occasional companionship of his or her own kind what better fate than to be born a snake? Thou art vivipotent and redolent of myth. Let us briefly consider, then, the true soul of the American desert, the purest expression of honesty and animal guilelessness the arid lands may offer, a spirit trustworthy and honorable and true, of the kind and pensive character one might admonish one's children to emulate, that exclamation mark to the desert's run-on sentence: the rattlesnake.
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