The Red Hourglass by Gordon Grice

Author:Gordon Grice [Grice, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56814-4
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1998-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

A couple rented a building for their motorcycle accessory business. The poured cement floor of the old building was divided into neat islands full of chrome and leather. Several months after the shop opened, the weather turned cool and the trouble started.

The woman was sitting at the desk doing paperwork when she heard a sound she described as “someone turning on a shower.” She pushed away from the desk, her swivel chair shooting back on its rollers. In the instant of moving she looked down to see the rattlesnake’s strike in a blur. The strike fell short of her retreating leg. About an inch short.

The woman ran for her baseball bat. She claims the rattler then became the recipient of a twenty-minute batting practice from which it did not emerge alive.

Up to this point, her experience was not unusual. Rattlesnakes do occasionally come into buildings for warmth. For example, some friends of mine had a house in the country. They came home one evening to find a sizable rattler coiled beside the washing machine in the utility room. The gentleman of the house prodded the intruder outside with a broom before demolishing it with buckshot. My friends had a situation ideal for drawing rattlesnakes. The utility room was flush with the ground. It had, besides the usual warmth of a human habitation, heat-producing machines (washer, dryer, and water heater) that would have been “visible” to the heat sense of a rattlesnake at night. And its floor was cement.

A surface of cement might as well be a rock for the rattlesnake’s purposes. Like flat rocks, cement surfaces soak up the heat of direct sunlight and pour that heat back into the air at night. Rattlesnakes use such surfaces to control their own body temperature. For example, a rattler emerging from his hiding place at dusk may lie on a radiating rock to get his blood warm for the hunt.

To my friends, the cement floor in their utility room was a clear indicator of a human territory. In fact, they seemed to consider the rattlesnake’s trespass not merely a danger but an insult. The snake, however, probably wasn’t even aware it would encounter humans, if in fact it had any concept of humans. It simply got cold and followed the heat across a surface that seemed natural enough and easy to move on. It must have had to squeeze through a crack or under the door, but snakes are good at that.

This problem, disconcerting as it was for my friends, was minor compared to the difficulties encountered by the couple at the motorcycle accessory shop. The day after the close call with the rattlesnake, they discovered a garter snake in the building. The following day brought a kingsnake, and the day after that a bull snake. When I came to visit the shop, no one was there. The cement floor of the building was flush with the ground, and there were several holes in the surrounding earth. A sign on the door read CLOSED DUE TO SNAKES.

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