Crotalus molossus
Black-tailed rattlesnake
Walker Thomas
Molossus is a kind of heavy-bodied, aggressive dog. Blacktail rattlesnakes are aggressive, but I’ve found that if I reach out calmly and touch one with a stick, it calms. The blacktail was called the most beautiful North American rattlesnake by Carl Kaufeld (touted as the world’s authority in the ’50s and ’60s). He describes it as gold on gold, based on ones he saw in the Chiricahuas and Huachucas, though in this area many have the green, gold and brown of a yellow-phase timber, the first rattlesnake I ever saw, in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. I have seen that gold-on-gold phase here though. The one in this poem had it.
Black tail its only part
It lives in rocks beside a pool
At dusk I watch its honeyed-molasses
Flow across trail and down
Mesquite-wooded slope to the cottonwood
At water’s edge
It pauses to taste the air with dowsing-rod tongue then turns
Quick coils before rock hollow to wait all night
Crawl deeper at first light
Its size and hue
Its urge to rattle too soon too loud
Its frightening displays
Lower its odds to survive
Human passage
But after a gentle nudge this one settles
Presses nose to lens to see
Itself
~~~~~
Walker Thomas planned to camp for a summer to observe wildlife drawn to a high-desert perennial spring, but then moved up into cooler alpine forest, where he found the added shelter of a tectonic cave. For nearly eight years he lived on thick mats shed from the mountain's trees or beneath its surface deep under ground. He wrote about that experience for Outside, Natural History, and Tucson's City Magazine, and is completing a book about the life that led a man to live in a cave.