fiwit's blog: When outside critters come inside, bad things can happen

<p>The story you're about to read is true. No names have been changed to protect any innocents. The events I'm relaying took place on the night of Oct. 31, 1997, also known as Hallowe'en (seems appropriate, somehow).  I was living in a ground-floor, 2-bedroom apartment in the outer edges of San Antonio (off Eckhert Rd, for those of you familiar with SATX). Used one of the bedrooms as my office, and the other as my bedroom. My computer was in my office (go figure).</p>
<p>Around  11pm, after spending all evening at my desk with my computer (playing with my PC and new modem, making sure they work right), I t scooted my chair back from my desk just missing a mess of coiled up cables.  Wait a minute - I didn't have any cables coiled up on the floor behind my desk. I looked again, and froze. There on the floor behind me, scant INCHES from my unprotected bare toes, was a young snake.</p>
<p>Yep. Snake. Of the wild kind. I suddenly found myself in front of the desk rather than behind it, with no memory of moving at all.   Left the room (I remember that movement), but when I came back a minute later, it was still there, coiled in the corner (pencil thin, about 12" long).  I believe in "live and let live" whenever possible, so I figured I'd grab a shoebox, ease the little guy into a shoebox and take him outside to a better place for him.  He was backed into a corner where the bookcase met the wall, so I couldn't grab him from behind, and couldn't just drop the shoebox on top of him.</p>
<p>I kept looking at him, thinking "this is a rattlesnake. I have a rattlesnake in my apartment!"  Thing is, I have a tendency to over-dramatize, so I wasn't letting myself  believe it was a rattlesnake.  That disbelief got harder to maintain when I was trying to corner it and it shook its tail at me before it bared its tiny teeth. </p>
<p>OK, time to get serious.  I went to find shovels or rakes or other implements of destruction (had none - don't need them when you live in an apartment), and when I came back it had disappeared.  Great. NOW where was it?  It had slithered behind the bookcase, to recover from the scare I gave it, I suppose (and where was I supposed to hide?).</p>
<p>I pulled the bookcase out from the wall, and set it to form a barricade keeping some space for the little guy so he felt like I couldn't reach him, and yet I could see him.  Then I called a friend's husband, who was both born and bred in Texas.</p>
<p>Chad answered the phone, and my first question to him was "how can I tell for sure if this snake in my office is a rattler?"  According to his wife, that galvanized him into a flurry of activity as he sped through every room in their house (and the garage) looking for his own version of shovels and rakes and implements of destruction (he didnt find any, either, having recently moved out of an apartment).</p>
<p>He told me to keep an eye on it and he'd be right over.</p>
<p>Twenty minutes later he was at my door, with a borrowed shovel, a borrowed hoe and his police-officer flashlight.  I showed him the snake, and he said "Yep! It's a rattler!" I immediately backed further away from the bookcase, but he called me back to hold the flashlight so he could see what he was doing.</p>
<p>He tried to scoop it up on the shovel, but it didn't want to cooperate, so he cut it in half instead. The poor dead critter was duly disposed of in the dumpster, and I made sure to let the apartment managers know so they could have maintenance try to figure out how it got in.</p>
<p>For the rest of that night, and the next several days, every time I saw a coil of cables, I jumped. And since I had 2 computers at the time, there were lots of computer cables around.</p>
<p>So there you have it, the fascinating story of The Great Rattlesnake Massacree of 1997.  We never did figure out how the little guy got into the apartment.</p>

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