The rattlesnake is a world-beater at minding his own business.
Men do far more fighting per capita than any snakes yet discovered.
The road to an understanding of the minds of serpents is long and difficult. Perhaps the best initial line of approach is through a well-stocked Reptile House. Having studied somewhat in that school I have emerged with a fixed belief that of all vertebrate creatures, snakes are the least understood, and also the most thoroughly misunderstood.
[Illustration: A
PEACE CONFERENCE WITH AN ARIZONA RATTLESNAKE "You let me alone and
I won't harm you" (From "Camp-Fires on Desert and Lava")]
[Illustration: HAWK-PROOF NEST OF A CACTUS WREN Placed in the centre of a tree choya cactus of Arizona and defended by 10 000 hostile spines (From "Camp-Fires on Desert and Lava")]
The world at large debits serpents with being far more quarrelsome and aggressive than they really are, and it credits them with knowing far less than they do know.
Attitude of Snakes Toward Each Other. Toward each other, the members of the various serpent species are tolerant, patient and peaceful to the last degree. You may place together in one cage twenty big Texas rattlers, or twenty ugly cottonmouth moccasins from the Carolinas, a hundred garter snakes, twenty boa constrictors, or six big pythons, and if the various species are kept separate there will be no fighting. You may stir them up to any reasonable extent, and make them keen to strike you, but they do not attack each other.
There are, however, many species that will not mix together in peace. For example, the king snake of New Jersey hates the rattlesnake, no matter what his address may be. Being by habit a constrictor, the king snake at once winds himself tightly around the neck of the rattler,—and proceeds to choke him to death.
The king cobra devours other snakes, as food, and wishes nothing else.
The Gopher Snake. Some snakes that feel sure you will not harm them will permit you to handle them without a protest or a fight. The most spectacular example is the gopher snake of the southeastern United States. This handsome, lustrous, blue-black species is six feet long, shiny, and as clean and smooth as ivory. Its members are famous rat-killers. You can pick up a wild one wherever you find it, and it will not bite you. They do not at all object to being handled, even by timorous lady visitors who never before have touched a live snake; and in the South they are tolerated by farmers for the good they do as rat catchers.