Another animal that impressed us deeply and painfully was the skunk.
They were fearless little beasts and in the evening would come quite
boldly about the house, and if seen and attacked by a dog, they would
defend themselves with the awful-smelling liquid they discharge at an
adversary.
When the wind brought a whiff of it into the house, when
all the doors and windows stood open, it would create a panic, and
people would get up from table feeling a little sea-sick, and go in
search of some room where the smell was not. Another powerful-smelling
but very beautiful creature was the common deer. I began to know it
from the age of five, when we went to our new home, and where we
children were sometimes driven with our parents to visit some
neighbours several miles away. There were always herds of deer on the
lands where the cardoon thistle nourished most, and it was a delight
to come upon them and to see their yellow figures standing among the
grey-green cardoon bushes, gazing motionless at us, then turning and
rushing away with a whistling cry, and sending out gusts of their
powerful musky smell, which the wind sometimes brought to our
nostrils.
But there was a something in the serpent which produced a quite
different and a stronger effect on the mind than bird or mammal or any
other creature. The sight of it was always startling, and however
often seen always produced a mixed sense of amazement and fear. The
feeling was no doubt acquired from our elders. They regarded snakes as
deadly creatures, and as a child I did not know that they were mostly
harmless, that it was just as senseless to kill them as to kill
harmless and beautiful birds. I was told that when I saw a snake I
must turn and run for my life until I was a little bigger, and then on
seeing a snake I was to get a long stick and kill it; and it was
furthermore impressed on me that snakes are exceedingly difficult to
kill, that many persons believe that a snake never really dies until
the sun sets, therefore when I killed a snake, in order to make it
powerless to do any harm between the time of killing it and sunset, it
was necessary to pound it to a pulp with the aforesaid long stick.
With such teaching it was not strange that even as a small boy I
became a persecutor of snakes.
Snakes were common enough about us; snakes of seven or eight different
kinds, green in the green grass, and yellow and dusky-mottled in dry
and barren places and in withered herbage, so that it was difficult to
detect them. Sometimes they intruded into the dwelling-rooms, and at
all seasons a nest or colony of snakes existed in the thick old
foundations of the house, and under the flooring. In winter they
hibernated there, tangled together in a cluster no doubt; and in
summer nights when they were at home, coiled at their ease or gliding
ghost-like about their subterranean apartments, I would lie awake and
listen to them by the hour. For although it may be news to some closet
ophiologists, serpents are not all so mute as we think them. At all
events this kind, the _Philodryas aestivus_ - a beautiful and harmless
colubrine snake, two and a half to three feet long, marked all over
with inky black on a vivid green ground - not only emitted a sound when
lying undisturbed in his den, but several individuals would hold a
conversation together which seemed endless, for I generally fell
asleep before it finished. A hissing conversation it is true, but
not unmodulated or without considerable variety in it; a long
sibilation would be followed by distinctly-heard ticking sounds, as of
a husky-ticking clock, and after ten or twenty or thirty ticks another
hiss, like a long expiring sigh, sometimes with a tremble in it as of
a dry leaf swiftly vibrating in the wind. No sooner would one cease
than another would begin; and so it would go on, demand and response,
strophe and antistrope; and at intervals several voices would unite in
a kind of low mysterious chorus, death-watch and flutter and hiss;
while I, lying awake in my bed, listened and trembled. It was dark in
the room, and to my excited imagination the serpents were no longer
under the floor, but out, gliding hither and thither over it, with
uplifted heads in a kind of mystic dance; and I often shivered to
think what my bare feet might touch if I were to thrust a leg out and
let it hang down over the bedside.
"I'm shut in a dark room with the candle blown out," pathetically
cried old Farmer Fleming, when he heard of his beautiful daughter
Dahlia's clandestine departure to a distant land with a nameless
lover. "I've heard of a sort of fear you have in that dilemma, lest
you should lay your fingers on edges of sharp knives, and if I think a
step - if I go thinking a step, and feel my way, I do cut myself, and I
bleed, I do." Only in a comparatively snakeless country could such
fancies be born and such metaphors used - snakeless and highly
civilized, where the blades of Sheffield are cheap and abundant. In
ruder lands, where ophidians abound, as in India and South America, in
the dark one fears the cold living coil and deadly sudden fang.
Serpents were fearful things to me at that period; but whatsoever is
terrible and dangerous, or so reported, has an irresistible attraction
for the mind, whether of child or man; it was therefore always a
pleasure to have seen a snake in the day's rambles, although the sight
was a startling one. Also in the warm season it was a keen pleasure to
find the cast slough of the feared and subtle creature.
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