I fear our resident black snake did not survive the cold winter, as he has not made an appearance this year. Every summer since we moved here seven years ago, he has made frequent forays about our homestead. I found him in the chicken house more than once, but we never missed the eggs.
Last year I shared a picture of the snake, and my friend Cliff Hoofman informed me that he was a southern black racer. While my heart still leaps and fear creeps in every time I'm surprised by a snake, I no longer kill reptiles of any kind, for I realize the role they play in nature. My Arkansas ancestors would have scoffed at the very notion!
Folklorists such as Vance Randolph and Otto Earnest Rayburn collected hundreds of stories about snakes, many of them fanciful if not outlandish. Randolph, in his 1951 book "We Always Lie to Strangers," found that "nearly all old-timers believe that a certain kind of snake puts its tail in its mouth and rolls hoop fashion through the hills." This folk belief also has a more sinister side in that the hoop snake is supposed to have a poisonous stinger at the end of its tail.
In his 1941 book "Ozark Country," Rayburn reported on a hoop snake attacking a woman, with its stinger barely touching her skirt. She washed her dress, and the poison "turned three tubs of wash water plumb green!"
In none of the folk stories does the hoop snake actually sting a human -- the victim usually being a tree. The tree often dies quickly after swelling up considerably.
Another bizarre folk belief involves snakes sucking milk from cows. Randolph reports that he has "known sober, serious-minded adults to declare that they have actually seen big snakes milking cows in the pasture."
Randolph is skeptical: "It seems to me that a snake's mouth, full of needle-like teeth pointing backward, would make milking difficult."
When I was growing up in the rural Ouachita Mountains during the 1950s and '60s, it was commonly believed that the coachwhip snake would chase people. Randolph reports that coachwhips were known not only to chase humans but were especially prone to chase and whip truant boys.
A large body of folk tales deals with warding off snakes as well as treating snake bites. Randolph says that many old-timers believed there was something about the smell of gourds that repelled snakes, inspiring settlers to grow gourds about their cabins.
A surprising number of accounts tell of snakes "charming" their victims. The stories vary, but usually they involve rattlesnakes which could lure prey -- most often involving squirrels and rabbits, but sometimes birds -- as if by hypnosis. Sometimes the rattlesnake was said to be "singing," a term often used to describe the rasping sound of the rattle.
Tales of gigantic snakes dot the historical record. One story from Logan County tells of a huge snake sighted around the turn of the 20th century in the local bottomland cotton fields. One farmer was plowing when his mule snorted and wheeled about, "hurriedly heading for the barn."
Locals scoffed at the story until the snake was seen killing and consuming a small pig, and when the snake paid a visit to a local one-room school, the teacher shouted, "Walls of Jericho!" and everyone fled. The story concludes with the snake being killed when it was found crossing a river. The belief is that the snake escaped from a circus wagon involved in a wreck.
While the Logan County story strains credulity, an 1869 report from Desha County telling of the capture of a rattlesnake measuring just over 11 feet is more credible, if still shocking.
Arkansas fiction writers have used snakes to add drama and danger to short stories and novels. Charles Portis' "True Grit," probably the most widely read novel by an Arkansas writer, contains a particularly dramatic scene involving rattlesnakes.
Mattie Ross, the teenage heroine who is out to avenge the murder of her father with the assistance of grizzled deputy U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn, finds herself pushed into a pit where a skeleton lies on the floor. In the dim light Mattie could see movement "within the cavity formed by the curving gray ribs ... Snakes! A ball of snakes!" Just before Cogburn arrives to save the day, Mattie is bitten by a small rattlesnake.
Arkansas has a richness of snakes and other reptiles. In the 1950s, zoo directors from across the nation came to Grassy Lake in Hempstead County in southwest Arkansas to collect poisonous snakes. Zoologist Marlin Perkins, who would later gain fame as the host of "Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom" television series, was among the visitors who sought out specimens of North America's poisonous copperheads, water moccasins, rattlesnakes and coral snakes.
We are fortunate that a group of Arkansas biologists published "The Amphibians and Reptiles of Arkansas" (University of Arkansas Press, 2004), which provides a thorough guide to the 45 species and subspecies of snakes known to live in Arkansas.
The state's largest venomous snake is the western diamondback. The most common is the copperhead, found in practically every county. For me, the most frightening is the cottonmouth or water moccasin which, unlike most snakes, is not retiring, but rather seems belligerent as its bares its white mouth to send an effective message of warning.
In recent years Arkansas newspapers have recorded encounters between people and large tropical pet snakes which have escaped their owners. In the autumn of 1989, a six-foot Burmese python was run over as it crossed Mississippi Street in Little Rock. Another python, an albino, was found outside Baptist Medical Center in 2005, having crossed busy Kanis Road.
Tom Dillard is an historian and retired archivist living near Glen Rose in rural Hot Spring County. Email him at [email protected]. An earlier version of this column was published Sept. 30, 2007.