“Check out this huge bull snake,” my wife Breja called from the woods near the cabin. She was washing some paint brushes over there. I’d just taken some black plastic netting off a window so I could paint the sill. We’d put the stuff up to keep birds from hitting the window.
I dropped the netting and went to see the snake stretched out in the leaf litter under some birches. He was golden with darker brown patterns down his length. This was a specimen, four feet long.
For a tail, he had a false rattle, and he played it now against some dried leaves. Our daughter Iris also took a break from painting to see the big snake. When he unfurled quickly, I jumped backing yelling, “Whoa!” Iris enjoyed seeing me scared. We watched the snake belly through the grass toward the lake and went back to work, happy for the encounter.
That night at dark I went out to clean a couple of walleyes I had caught after dinner. The bugs were already out. By the glow of my headlamp I saw something black moving at the edge of the woods. It was the plastic netting I had taken off the window, but something was animating it. Then I saw. It was the huge bull snake, wrapped impossibly in the plastic. What had I done?
I held the snake by the head while Breja used scissors to cut the plastic squares one by one. It was excruciating surgery. The snake had twisted itself thousands of times into netting. Finally we freed it.
The next morning, we saw the hungry bull snake stationed beneath the bird feeder.
