VII
MUCH AS I LIKED Antonia, I hated a superior tone that she sometimes took
with me. She was four years older than I, to be sure, and had seen more of
the world; but I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented her
protecting manner. Before the autumn was over, she began to treat me more
like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading lessons.
This change came about from an adventure we had together.
One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas' I found Antonia starting off on
foot for Russian Peter's house, to borrow a spade Ambrosch needed. I
offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me. There had been
another black frost the night before, and the air was clear and heady as
wine. Within a week all the blooming roads had been despoiled, hundreds of
miles of yellow sunflowers had been transformed into brown, rattling, burry
stalks.
We found Russian Peter digging his potatoes. We were glad to go in and get
warm by his kitchen stove and to see his squashes and Christmas melons,
heaped in the storeroom for winter. As we rode away with the spade,
Antonia suggested that we stop at the prairie-dog-town and dig into one of
the holes. We could find out whether they ran straight down, or were
horizontal, like mole-holes; whether they had underground connections;
whether the owls had nests down there, lined with feathers. We might get
some puppies, or owl eggs, or snakeskins.
The dog-town was spread out over perhaps ten acres. The grass had been
nibbled short and even, so this stretch was not shaggy and red like the
surrounding country, but grey and velvety. The holes were several yards
apart, and were disposed with a good deal of regularity, almost as if the
town had been laid out in streets and avenues. One always felt that an
orderly and very sociable kind of life was going on there. I picketed Dude
down in a draw, and we went wandering about, looking for a hole that would
be easy to dig. The dogs were out, as usual, dozens of them, sitting up on
their hind legs over the doors of their houses. As we approached, they
barked, shook their tails at us, and scurried underground. Before the
mouths of the holes were little patches of sand and gravel, scratched up,
we supposed, from a long way below the surface. Here and there, in the
town, we came on larger gravel patches, several yards away from any hole.
If the dogs had scratched the sand up in excavating, how had they carried
it so far? It was on one of these gravel beds that I met my adventure.
We were examining a big hole with two entrances. The burrow sloped into
the ground at a gentle angle, so that we could see where the two corridors
united, and the floor was dusty from use, like a little highway over which
much travel went. I was walking backward, in a crouching position, when I
heard Antonia scream. She was standing opposite me, pointing behind me and
shouting something in Bohemian. I whirled round, and there, on one of
those dry gravel beds, was the biggest snake I had ever seen. He was
sunning himself, after the cold night, and he must have been asleep when
Antonia screamed. When I turned, he was lying in long loose waves, like a
letter `W.' He twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big
snake, I thought--he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity,
his loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my
leg, and looked as if millstones couldn't crush the disgusting vitality out
of him. He lifted his hideous little head, and rattled. I didn't run
because I didn't think of it--if my back had been against a stone wall I
couldn't have felt more cornered. I saw his coils tighten--now he would
spring, spring his length, I remembered. I ran up and drove at his head
with my spade, struck him fairly across the neck, and in a minute he was
all about my feet in wavy loops. I struck now from hate. Antonia,
barefooted as she was, ran up behind me. Even after I had pounded his ugly
head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back
on itself. I walked away and turned my back. I felt seasick.
Antonia came after me, crying, `O Jimmy, he not bite you? You sure? Why
you not run when I say?'
`What did you jabber Bohunk for? You might have told me there was a snake
behind me!' I said petulantly.
`I know I am just awful, Jim, I was so scared.' She took my handkerchief
from my pocket and tried to wipe my face with it, but I snatched it away
from her. I suppose I looked as sick as I felt.
`I never know you was so brave, Jim,' she went on comfortingly. `You is
just like big mans; you wait for him lift his head and then you go for him.
Ain't you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake home and show
everybody. Nobody ain't seen in this kawntree so big snake like you
kill.'
She went on in this strain until I began to think that I had longed for
this opportunity, and had hailed it with joy. Cautiously we went back to
the snake; he was still groping with his tail, turning up his ugly belly in
the light. A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a thread of green
liquid oozed from his crushed head.
`Look, Tony, that's his poison,' I said.
I took a long piece of string from my pocket, and she lifted his head with
the spade while I tied a noose around it. We pulled him out straight and
measured him by my riding-quirt; he was about five and a half feet long.
He had twelve rattles, but they were broken off before they began to taper,
so I insisted that he must once have had twenty-four. I explained to
Antonia how this meant that he was twenty-four years old, that he must have
been there when white men first came, left on from buffalo and Indian
times. As I turned him over, I began to feel proud of him, to have a kind
of respect for his age and size. He seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil.
Certainly his kind have left horrible unconscious memories in all
warm-blooded life. When we dragged him down into the draw, Dude sprang off
to the end of his tether and shivered all over-- wouldn't let us come near
him.
We decided that Antonia should ride Dude home, and I would walk. As she
rode along slowly, her bare legs swinging against the pony's sides, she
kept shouting back to me about how astonished everybody would be. I
followed with the spade over my shoulder, dragging my snake. Her
exultation was contagious. The great land had never looked to me so big
and free. If the red grass were full of rattlers, I was equal to them all.
Nevertheless, I stole furtive glances behind me now and then to see that
no avenging mate, older and bigger than my quarry, was racing up from the
rear.
The sun had set when we reached our garden and went down the draw toward
the house. Otto Fuchs was the first one we met. He was sitting on the
edge of the cattle-pond, having a quiet pipe before supper. Antonia called
him to come quick and look. He did not say anything for a minute, but
scratched his head and turned the snake over with his boot.
`Where did you run onto that beauty, Jim?'
`Up at the dog-town,' I answered laconically.
`Kill him yourself? How come you to have a weepon?'
`We'd been up to Russian Peter's, to borrow a spade for Ambrosch.'
Otto shook the ashes out of his pipe and squatted down to count the
rattles. `It was just luck you had a tool,' he said cautiously. `Gosh! I
wouldn't want to do any business with that fellow myself, unless I had a
fence-post along. Your grandmother's snake-cane wouldn't more than tickle
him. He could stand right up and talk to you, he could. Did he fight
hard?'
Antonia broke in: `He fight something awful! He is all over Jimmy's
boots. I scream for him to run, but he just hit and hit that snake like he
was crazy.'
Otto winked at me. After Antonia rode on he said: `Got him in the head
first crack, didn't you? That was just as well.'
We hung him up to the windmill, and when I went down to the kitchen, I
found Antonia standing in the middle of the floor, telling the story with a
great deal of colour.
Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first encounter
was fortunate in circumstance. My big rattler was old, and had led too
easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had probably lived there
for years, with a fat prairie-dog for breakfast whenever he felt like it, a
sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he had forgot that
the world doesn't owe rattlers a living. A snake of his size, in fighting
trim, would be more than any boy could handle. So in reality it was a mock
adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for many
a dragon-slayer. I had been adequately armed by Russian Peter; the snake
was old and lazy; and I had Antonia beside me, to appreciate and admire.
That snake hung on our corral fence for several days; some of the
neighbours came to see it and agreed that it was the biggest rattler ever
killed in those parts. This was enough for Antonia. She liked me better
from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me again. I
had killed a big snake--I was now a big fellow.
