Dennie Miller was excited. He had recently learned of the existence of a “new kingsnake” in Texas. This was the Blair’s kingsnake, a species that, according to the lore and to Dennie, was the “queen of them all."

Now, he, and we (Gordy Johnston and I) were piling into Gordy’s well aged (almost geriatric) VW beetle with Texas’ Hanging Judge Roy Bean’s legendary region our ultimate destination. Our quest—well, you can guess.

And as luck would have it, on that first hunt we succeeded in finding not one but two of those coveted kingsnakes that are now known, after several taxonomic modifications, to be a color variant of the gray-banded kingsnake, Lampropeltis alterna.

The first was a dark phase, and it was found beneath the cattle guard almost at the door of Bill and Doris Chamberlin’s old Langtry gas station.



The second one, much more brilliantly colored, was crossing the Comstock Road.