I live in the Hudson Highlands and over ten years have seen three live rattlesnakes in my walks. Today was my most dramatic sighting.
I was bushwacking up a sharp incline at about 800 feet, through leaves and branches and loose rock, when one of my dogs stopped ahead of me and I heard a noise like air escaping a tire after someone had icepicked it. For a moment I wondered if the dog had opened some sort of gassy seam in the earth and then I thought, it’s a rattler.
I climbed a lot closer and there it was, looped in a lazy coil, half on leaves and half on rock, as though interrupted in its progress down the hill, bright green with brown diamonds, its tail held high in the air and quivering like a lacquered green-brown Chinatown novelty, making that buzzing gassy sound. It didn’t pause an instant, but kept at it for the next five or six minutes as I climbed the hill above and out of earshot. It was fat, and its green look seemed related to the sudden spring we’re experiencing. Its head, balanced low above a turn in its body, looked like a bright divot of moss.
The sound freezes your blood. I tried to get back to trails and couldn’t not examine the ground every step I took. A guy nearly died of a bite in 2005 a half mile from where I saw this snake. Still, it’s magnificent to see an animal hold its ground like that.
