Though only in the merry month of May, blackberries of enormous size and delicious flavour, trailing on long briars yards and yards over the mossy grass, invited us to break our fast; and, all unmindful of the breakfast-hour, we feasted and rested.
Suddenly we found ourselves no longer shaded by the wood to the east of us, for the sun had mounted high; and at the first touch of his scorching rays as we rose to our feet, we glanced at each other in dismay, for we had open ground to cross in getting home. My Virginia companion said that it would be better to ford the streams in the wood, than risk sunstroke by crossing a cornfield, our nearest way home.
This we decided to do, and having surmounted all obstacles, were almost within earshot of the house, when Ella, with a shriek, started and ran back, exclaiming, ‘A moccasin!’
‘What? where?’ I eagerly inquired, trying to follow the direction of her eye.
‘Oh, Miss Hopley, come back! Quick! Come away! Water moccasins are worse than rattlesnakes, for they dart at you!’
Sufficiently alarming, certainly; yet I wanted to see the terrible object, and ascertain how far off it was, and at length discovered the head and neck of a snake erect. About a foot of it was visible, and might have been taken for a slight stem or stick standing perpendicularly out of the swampy herbage bordering the narrow path. The fixed eyes and darting ‘sting’—which I then thought the tongue to be—seemed to endorse the character my young friend had given it. Yet I lingered, ‘fascinated,’ no doubt, by its gaze, the fascination in my case partaking of curiosity chiefly. The reptile remained so rigid that I was inclined to venture nearer; nor did I welcome the idea of having to retrace our steps and risk the open field under that Virginia sun. But Ella would not hear of passing the deadly snake. There were others, she was sure, in that swampy part.
Well, we reached home at last, more dead than alive, having discarded our treasured specimens and substituted sprays of enormous leaves with which to shield our heads from the sun. And I have ever reflected, that of the two dangers—snakes and sunstroke—we risked the greater in traversing that cornfield at such an hour.
Besides that ‘deadly moccasin’ and frequent ‘black snakes,’ there were ‘whip snakes,’ ‘milk snakes,’ and many others which the negroes would bring home as trophies of their courageous slaughter; but by no scientific names were they known there. Except this name moccasin or mokeson, which probably conveyed some especial meaning to the aborigines, few of the Indian vernaculars have been preserved in the United States, as we find them in other parts of America, which latter are treated of in chapters xxii. and xxiii. of this work; but common English names prevail.
After a time I proposed to write a book about snakes, starting with the stereotyped ideas that they all ‘stung’ in some incomprehensible way; that the larger kinds crushed up horses and cattle like wisps of straw; and that all, having viciously taken the life of the victim, proceeded with epicurean gusto to lick it all over and smear it with saliva, that it might glide down their throat like an oyster! There are those who to this day believe the same.