The first time I saw that big dangerous-looking snake, it almost scared me half to death. It flattened out its ugly head, with its fierce-looking, shovel-shaped nose, and at the same time expanded its neck until it was almost three times as big as it had been. The snake was making a hissing sound like air being let out of a tire of my blue-and-white bicycle.
I stood stock-still and stared at it, my whole body tense with fright. It was lying in a half coil and had been sunning itself on the sandy path that leads from the two big pignut trees above our garden to an old iron pitcher pump at the other side of our farm.
If anybody had seen me staring at that savage-looking, mad-looking, mad-acting, reddish-yellow, thick-bodied snake with irregular-shaped brownish-black blotches scattered all the way down its length from neck to tail, he’d have said my eyes had widened until they were as big as the puffed-out head and neck of that snake.
I was barefoot too, so if the snake had wanted to, it could have bitten my foot or my ankle or one of my ten bare toes—I was that close to it. I didn’t even have a stick in my hand as I sometimes have when I walk around our farm, so I couldn’t sock the snake the way a boy likes to do when he sees one.
“Hiss-s-s-s!” the big-bodied snake said to me fiercely.
Its ugly head was shaped like a triangle in our arithmetic book in school, and its nose turned up at the tip as if it was trying to smell to see what kind of strange animal I was myself.
As I said, I was scared stiff. My greenish-gray eyes must have been almost bulging out of their sockets as I wondered what on earth to do to kill the snake. If I tried to jump back, would it make a lunge for me and strike me with its fangs?
I couldn’t help but think of one of the members of the Sugar Creek Gang whose name is Dragonfly. When he sees something exciting before the rest of us do, he always hisses like a snake, and his own eyes get big and round like a dragonfly’s eyes are all the time, which is why we call him by that name.
Well, not having a stick to sock the snake, and not knowing what else to do, and being scared anyway, I let out several screams. In fact, I screamed maybe a half-dozen times, because the snake was not only puffing out its neck and hissing, but its triangle-shaped head was darting in and out in my direction very fiercely.
I must have come to life all of a sudden, for the next thing I knew, I had leaped back about six feet and was looking all around for a rock to hit the snake with. But I couldn’t find any because Dad and I had been picking up all the rocks from our farm for years and taking them out of the fields so we could raise better crops.
Even though I didn’t find any rock, I did spy a big clod of dirt almost as big as my little sister Charlotte Ann’s pretty round head, so I quick stooped, grabbed it up in my big-for-a-boy’s hands, lifted it high over my head, and with all my fierce, half-scared, half-mad strength hurled it down toward the snake’s shovel-shaped snout.
But as much as I hate to have to admit it, I missed. The dirt clod squished itself into a million particles of dirt and dust right beside where the snake’s head had been a second before the clod got there.
And then the queerest thing I ever saw happened. That big forty-inch-long, yellowish-red snake all of a sudden opened its mouth wide and began to twist itself into and out of several kinds of knots as though I had actually hit it and injured it terribly. The next thing I knew, it gave itself a sideways flip-flop and landed on its back, exposing its pretty yellowish-green snake’s stomach to the hot sun, which was shining down on both of us.
And the second it got on its back, it all of a sudden quit wriggling and twisting and just lay there as if it was absolutely dead.
What on earth! I thought. I must have hit it after all! And yet, I knew I hadn’t, because I’d seen my clod of dirt miss by almost six inches. All that had happened to it was that maybe a lot of dust and dirt had spattered it in the eyes and on the side of its angry head and three-inch-wide puffed-out neck.
But there it lay, not making a move and looking like a terribly big fishing worm that was as lifeless as a fishing worm is when a robin has pecked it to death, just before feeding it to one of her babies.
Well, what do you know? I thought. I scared him to death! I didn’t know if it was my clod of dirt or the way I had yelled at it. But, of course, it couldn’t actually be dead.
I looked around and saw a long stick, which I hadn’t seen before, and, just to make sure, I picked up the stick and poked at the snake. It didn’t even move the end of its tail but lay absolutely quiet.
I don’t know what made me do what I did just then, but I all of a sudden felt very brave, sort of like maybe David in the Bible story, when he had killed a giant with one little stone out of his slingshot. I remembered that David was supposed to have had red hair, like mine, so I looked down at that giant shovel-nosed snake and yelled down at it, “Get up, you coward! Get up and fight like a man!”
Having the long stick in my hand, I knew I could kill it, as I had a lot of garter snakes and water snakes around Sugar Creek. So I yelled at it again, calling it a coward to let a ten-year-old boy scare it to death.
And then I got another surprise. From the direction of the iron pitcher pump, which is right close by the stile that we go over to go to school in the fall and winter and spring, I heard a boy’s yell. I knew it was the voice of my friend Poetry, the barrel-shaped member of our gang, who was my almost best friend and whose house I was on my way to when I had run into the snake.
“Who’s a coward?” Poetry yelled to me from the top of the stile, where he was when I looked up and saw him. Then he scrambled his roly-poly self down the stile’s four steps and came puffing toward me, walking up the dusty path.
“I just killed a great big snake.” I said. “A fierce-looking one about six feet long and as big around as your wrist.” It wasn’t quite that big, but now that I was a hero, it seemed the snake was bigger than it was. Besides, I wanted Poetry to think it was until he got to where he could see it himself. Then I’d tell him I was only fooling, which different members of the gang were always doing to each other anyway.
I stood there, looking at Poetry lumbering toward me. Also I kept glancing at my defeated enemy, wondering how on earth I’d managed to scare it to death.
In a minute Poetry was there, and both of us were standing back about eight or ten feet and looking down at the yellowish-green, upturned stomach of the snake.
“How’d you do it?” Poetry asked. “What’d you hit him with—that stick?”
“I scared him to death!”
“Scared him to death! That’s just plain dumb. You can’t do that to a snake. You have to hit him with something.”
“I did,” I said with a mischievous grin in my mind. “I threw my voice at him, and it hit him, and he just twisted himself up into a couple of knots, like a boy does when he gets the cramps from eating green apples, and he plopped himself over on his back and died, right in front of my eyes. I’m a ventriloquist. I can throw my voice, you know.”
Well, it was fun kidding Poetry. Then I told him I’d missed the snake with a clod of dirt but that he’d died anyway.
“Maybe there was a rock in the clod,” Poetry said, “and when the clod hit the ground six inches from his head, and burst in pieces, the rock flew out and hit him on the head, and it just sort of accidentally killed him.”
That reminded me again of red-haired David. If there was anything in the world I’d rather do than anything else, it was to imagine myself to be somebody else—like a hero in our history books at school or a brave character in the Bible. Right that second, I remembered that David’s one small smooth stone had socked Giant Goliath, killing him deader than a doornail. David had rushed up to the fallen giant and had stood on him, and it seemed maybe I ought to do that to my giant-sized, shovel-nosed snake.
“That’s Giant Goliath,” I said to Poetry, “and I’m David. I’m going to stand on him and cut off his head and—”
“Stop!” Poetry said. “He might not be dead. Here, give me that stick.”
He took my stick, eased himself up closer to the snake, and poked at it. But it didn’t move at all, not even its tail.
“It’s dead, all right,” I said, feeling even prouder of myself than I had been, because of what I had done.
Right that second, Poetry looked at his wristwatch and frowned at it and said, “Hey, we’ve got to get going! There’s a gang meeting down at the spring. Big Jim just phoned our house, and it’s very important. He tried to call you, but nobody answered your phone, so I was on my way over to get you.”