Snake-Bit

I have always liked snakes. My two sisters and my brother used to tease me because I’d go looking for slithery snakes with shiny scales and eyes that glittered and glared. I was raised on a ranch in the high desert country just south of Taos, New Mexico. There were a lot of snakes around. Some of them were dangerous, like rattlesnakes, and some were harmless, like garter snakes.

My horse did not like snakes. She was a strawberry roan with long, thin legs. Her name was Babe. I didn’t name her. She came with that name, and since she answered to it, I kept it.

Babe was a good old horse. She’d been bred and trained as a Tennessee walker, and she could glide along in the smooth “running walk” of her breed. But she failed to win prizes and so was sold to our ranch.

I loved Babe. She always did what I wanted her to do. She disobeyed me only when we would come across a snake. Then she would turn and run for home just as fast as her fine legs would carry her. I would hang on for dear life. I liked those runs. They were exciting. Babe never wanted to hurt me. She just wanted to save herself. Horses and snakes don’t mix.

One summer day when I was ten, I took Babe out for a ride. We liked to go to a place called the Barranca, a huge piece of land owned by the Pueblo People. The land was bare of any houses. It wasn’t used for anything except to graze a few skinny cows.

Dry cliffs, which is what barranca means in Spanish, rose a hundred feet above the plain. The land was wild and beautiful, and I could run Babe straight out without ever seeing a fence.

On especially hot days I’d find an overhang at the base of a cliff, slide off the horse, and rest in the shade. I rode bareback. None of the kids I knew who had horses used saddles. We felt freer with our bottoms slipping around on the horse’s back.

This particular day I found a cool spot and dismounted, leaving Babe with her reins hanging to the ground. I trusted her because she never ran off when I sat like that, cooling off in the shadows of those big cliffs.

I left Babe and began to explore a dry, narrow arroyo, which is a ravine cut into the cliff face by torrents of rainwater. To pull myself up on a ledge I reached with my hand, and that’s when it happened.

The rattlesnake was not at all pleased to have a hand thrust in its face. It struck, and it bit me on the tip of my left index finger. The strike was a powerful sting. I lost my balance and fell. Actually, it was more of a slide. I landed in a dusty heap at Babe’s feet, clutching my arm, which already hurt from the spreading venom.

Even from a distance the sound of the snake’s rattle came loud and clear on the still air. Babe reared back at the noise, her sensitive ears picking up the one sound in the world she feared most.

I looked up at the horse’s round, terrified eyes, her red mane flowing in the sun’s glare. “Don’t run, Babe!” I cried. “Stay, Babe! Stay!”

I knew her instinct told her to run, but if she did I’d be finished. My hand was beginning to swell. The finger had a single fang mark in it. I threw up.

Babe tossed her head this way and that. In one long moment I climbed on her back, and we took off for home. I am alive today because she did not run away.

I spent that summer recovering, mostly lying outside in my very own lawn chair. I was so sick at first that I thought I would die. My stomach didn’t work for a while, and I became thin. Then, slowly but surely, food became easier to keep down, and my strength came back. I remember the first time I had an orange ice-cream bar again—and how good that was. In a few months, I recovered fully and was able to ride Babe into the Barranca again.

Ranchers are not supposed to care about an animal after it has lost its usefulness. Babe was an exception. She had saved my life. We kept her, even though as years passed, her long legs became weak with arthritis.

She’s buried on the edge of the Barranca, beside the river where the cottonwoods are, next to the Pueblo land we loved so well. I ride past there now, in my car. I go there to hike on warm summer days, and I think of her. I see her in my mind’s eye: Babe, the Tennessee walker who failed as a show horse but never let me down.