26

Breathing like a hound down spring’s throat came summer — the real challenge of the Mojave Desert. In the minds of those who cannot learn to love it, the Mojave is synonymous with the most unpleasant extremes. Extremes of heat and extremes of violence. As we live in the High Desert, we can kid ourselves for much of the year that we are not actually in the desert. But when summer arrives, the lie is exposed.

‘The season’ ends because city folk stay in their cities, and locals try to stay out of the sun’s daunting rays.

There can be no pride in surviving autumn, winter, or the spring. That’s the easy bit. For three months a year — three months that feel like three years — mad dogs and Englishmen try to stay in shade or indoors until indoors is hotter than outdoors.

‘Wait till the summer comes,’ we were cautioned time after time.

‘We don’t mind the heat,’ we would reply. ‘We’re used to it.’

‘Yeah, I guess Australia’s pretty hot, but it’s nothing like this. You’ll see.’

Weather has a way of directing human behaviour in a fashion that city dwellers are scarcely aware of. It might reach 43 degrees Celsius in LA and even more in The Valley, but for the most part this heat is experienced as an inconvenience rather than a daily (and nightly) reality. August, we were gleefully informed, is like a bad LSD trip made worse by the belief that the heat will never end. August is the cruellest month. September might be as hot, but there is in the air a suggestion that the heat has done its best, a whiff of relief.

As the temperature rose, the house, being built into the rock, remained cool, but I knew it was time to master the workings of the swamp coolers that Bill Lavender had positioned at strategic parts of the building. Bill had explained the subject back around Christmas, which seemed a lifetime away. I knew they functioned or were supposed to function in the same way as an air conditioner, except that they used virtually no power and little water, and did not damage the ozone layer by releasing freon. They work by spraying a trickle of water onto porous beds of Aspen paper, which make up the cooler’s walls, and using a tiny engine to spin a large fan that blows the water-cooled air through a series of ducts and into the house. The result was an amazingly effective and environmentally benign cooling system that soon had to be turned off as the house became as cold as it was in the frosty days we had hoped were behind us.

While I fiddled with such, Boo was getting herself into a state over the emergence of a new threat — rattlesnakes.

‘The rattlesnakes have woken up and they’re hungry’ rattled the headline from The Desert Sun. It was the moment Boo had been dreading. The manager of the city dump, the article went on, had already killed three big rattlers in a week. Peter, a refugee from the old commie days of Czechoslovakia, did not remember them appearing this early before. Peter had escaped the brutal forces of that state by crawling through a forest and swimming a river, and became an accomplished snake man after finding his way to the free world twenty-five years ago. Peter had given up on keeping rattlesnakes.

The article explained this early arrival phenomenon. It was global warming. Or El Niño, followed by La Niña. Take your pick. The rains had caused the vegetation to go berserk. Everything was shooting up like a drugstore cowboy, and the rodents were having a field day. Jack rabbits bounded across the scrub, dodging their cotton-tailed cousins like cars on a freeway. Chipmunks, mice, and pack rats threw parties, and the rattlesnakes waited for their chance to gatecrash. They also come down from the rocks looking for water, and it was not unusual to find them curled up near the tap. An old man had recently bent down to uncoil his garden hose where a Green Mojave — the most deadly of all the rattlers — was curled up enjoying the heat of the warm plastic, perfectly camouflaged. By the time he got to the doctor, the finger that had taken the hit was completely black and had to be amputated.

It’s not that Boo is fond of black widow spiders or scorpions, but she is quite happy to leave them alone as long as they watch their manners. But snakes are a whole different game. They terrify her, even though most are not only harmless but practically a man’s best friend. Take the Rosy Boa. It is a smaller member of the boa-constrictor family, and has a reddish hue that is best described as ‘rosy’. It has no venom. It doesn’t even bite. But not only will it gobble up mice after crushing them, it will do the same to a rattlesnake, though I am not quite sure how. It is a snake you can give children to play with, as it seems to delight in slithering around one’s body — no doubt enjoying the warmth. After encountering one in the laundry one morning and admiring its beauty, Boo was placated on the question of the boa family, and even warmed to the idea of their being present. But her nerves began to fray when Boulder House was described as ‘rattlesnake heaven’, and especially when the rattlers started coming to the front door.

The locals, as always, were delighted to offer city folk advice, but, as always, the advice was contradictory and not altogether reassuring.

Always watch where you put your feet — and hands. Always carry a stick. Always carry a torch. They’re nocturnal. Always keep your dog locked up. Talk to them. Tell them you like them. Get a mongoose. Forget the mongoose — the dog will eat it. Get an outdoor cat. Forget the cat — the coyotes will get it unless the owls get there first. Get rid of all the vegetation around your house.

Get rid of the dog’s water bowl. Shoot the sons of bitches.

Get a goose. Geese love snakes. The geese appealed to Boo until someone pointed out that they also love water. Our swimming pool would have a nice coating of slimy goose shit within a week.

All agreed that baby rattlers are the most likely to inflict bites that could be mortal, and most dangerous of all is the Mojave Green. Apparently, it attacks both the heart and the nervous system. The little ones are worse, as nature endows them with ample venom to help them on their path to adulthood. But nature omits to inform them that a quick bite will usually deter its enemies. Sinking its entire store of venom into a large animal (for instance, a human) is a waste of good venom, as an eight-inch rattlesnake has no chance of consuming even the smallest of children.

In the end, we settled on a kind of peaceful coexistence on the property with Mutual Assured Destruction agreed upon in the immediate perimeter of Boulder House.

I had no fear of rattlesnakes, having dealt with their far more deadly Australian cousins as a kid in the Australian bush. Within the first week of summer I found it necessary to kill two, but only because they were virtually entering the house — one had crossed the porch — and I feared for Sailor and Boo. These were an average-sized couple clearly mating somewhere very close to the house. Having watched our beloved Harry (our first springer) decline following a snakebite, I reluctantly put a spade through their necks, and carefully buried the heads. One thing not common to the Aussie snakes, to my knowledge, is the fact that the rattler can kill when it is already dead. It is essential to bury the head, as its muscles continue to contract after it has been chopped off; if the creature manages to sink his fangs into man, woman, or dog, it will pump all its venom into the victim. I guess it’s things like this that cause people to fear snakes more than any other of nature’s more unfriendly creations.

But if the snakes stay out of the house I maintain a live-and-let-live approach, as when an Australian friend, Woodley, stumbled on a huge western rattler a few days later.

Big Foot Woodley had just arrived from Australia, bringing an inflatable, floating bar, and while I was attending to the pool he had wandered off a few hundred yards to a ridge, where he came face to face with the biggest and loudest rattler I have ever seen. I saw him waving frantically from the ridge — not a difficult task, as he is almost seven feet tall and has arms the length of a standard pool table. I grabbed a spade and went to inspect the reptile. Sailor had already bounded over to check things out. A big rattler is one of nature’s finest sights, and one can imagine why Eve got off on snakes when looking at this coiled mass of gold and brown — its flecked scales perfectly woven for what might have been five feet. Sailor walked past it, inches away, and its rattle rattled and my blood ran cold.

The snake was backed up against a boulder, and I raised the spade to end its life. Sailor, oblivious to the danger, had wandered a short distance to launch an assault on a small shrub, which presumably harboured a lizard. Sailor has not the faintest interest in snakes, or, for that matter, birds, quail, or any prey that should concern a bird dog. Lizards and tennis balls had continued as his dual obsessions, although as the weather warmed he would take an interest in flies, spending hours vainly snapping at them. Like the lizards, the flies always escaped, but this in no way reduced his determination to rid Boulder House of these pests. He disliked ants, another of the plagues of summer, but gave up the habit after being bitten on the nose by an angered ant — a development that was to cause me to have to rush him to hospital, at 1.00 a.m. — a return trip of some two hundred and thirty kilometres.

I was well into The Ruthless Gun and enjoying a cold beer out in the courtyard when Boo burst in to announce that Sailor’s face was swelling and that he was beginning to resemble Bob Hope.

‘You’re imagining it,’ I replied, but she insisted, and after half an hour I had to admit that he was getting a queer look around the head.

‘A snake must have got him,’ Boo shouted. ‘We have to get him to the vet. Now!’

Sailor might have been aware of his swollen nose, but concentrated on enjoying the journey — an hour and a half of it — roaming the back seat and barking furiously at the cars that were travelling at that late hour. The nurse refused to even allow him to see the vet, and examined him in the outer office. She was good-natured about it, but insisted the vet was far too busy to deal with what she thought ‘might be an ant bite’. The springer pranced happily around the office catching up with the latest smells, while Boo argued that he had probably been snake bit — and was likely to pass away at any moment. I stood glumly by the door as the kindly woman explained the difference between a snake and an ant bite until a distraught woman burst into the emergency clinic with a small mutt that seemed to be bleeding from every part of its body. It was hard to tell what sort of a dog she carried in her bloody, tear-drenched arms. She shrieked hysterically about a pack of coyotes that had savaged ‘her baby’, and even Boo forgot the faint swelling of Sailor’s nose.

But that was to come. Here I stood, spade on high, ready to sever the neck of this fabulous great western rattlesnake. The serpent looked up at me, and it was clear from his look that his time had come. He could strike — and probably was about to — but it wouldn’t help his cause. He knew he was a goner, and it seemed sad to end the life of so magnificent a creature. But Woodley was watching, and I knew — as did the snake — that it must die. Then I thought of Sailor, whom the snake could so easily have killed, and slowly lowered the spade and stepped back. The rattler silenced his rattle. We watched one another for some time, the snake eyeing me balefully, and me returning the stare with one of admiration. The creature showed less fear than I felt. Finally, we left the monster on his sunny perch, and returned to the pool, Sailor springing happily beside us.