The car was far ahead of us when it swerved sharply. What, we wondered, was the reason for that?

Jake and I were road cruising and not in any real hurry. The car ahead had disappeared from sight around a curve, and we were now near their position when they had swerved.

Suddenly Jake yelled, "Canebrake!" And sure enough, lying almost dead center in the road was a 4-and-a-half foot long canebrake rattler, Crotalus horridus "atricaudatus."



As I slowed to a stop, Jake grabbed a hook and piled out. As he neared the snake, now alerted, another car approached from around the curve. Jake touched the snake on the tail and fortunately, the snake proved to be a runner. It wanted no familiarity with anything and darted across the road, but then stopped on the grassy verge and looked like it was heading back. We stopped it.

The other car, filled with young women, stopped near us. They asked in unison, "What is it?"

"Rattler," Jake replied.

"What are you doing with it?" one of them asked.

"Keeping it off of the road." I replied.

"Let it go," one of the young women said. "We came back to kill it."

"Looks like you’re out of luck," I told them.

"You’re not killing this one," Jeff said. A couple of more unintelligible comments, and they left.

Gives me a warm, fuzzy, feeling to know that Jake and I were able to save this big male from the road idiots.

The locale was rather open, and once the canebrake was in the canebrake, having slowed to cross the roadside ditch, we guided him to the foot of a big pine.

Once against it, he coiled quietly, a monarch of the southern brakes.

More photos under the jump...