PROFESSIONAL

This morning I was restacking the old firewood into a new and improved arrangement for next year, and was just lifting the last 10cm diameter cherry log from the northernmost cord open to the wind so I could stack some newly split wood there, when all of a sudden on the support cedar log below was a professional baby mamushi, going "Huh?" "Wha?" "I was asleep, man, what the..." looking around and talking kinda slow like the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland saying Wwwhhhooo aaarrreee yyyooouuu??? Actually he was a bit older than a baby mamushi, which would be more like the snake I found under my front door one morning.

He'd be about a foot long were one to stretch him out, which I was not about to do, you can if you want, and even though he was curled up small I could tell he was a mamushi because of the casual and fearless way he addressed me, a giant looming over him with giant claws and clothes and stuff. He didn't dash off at lightspeed, the way venomless snakes always do. Plus there was the professional pinstriping and other decorations along his body, even though not in the black-and-brown of mamushi adulthood, or the black-and-gray of infancy-- more like, I guess, an adolescent red-and-green-- but even if you've never seen it before, way in your inherited archives you always know exactly what it means-- that "zero at the bone" that Emily spoke of. He slowly tilted his head up to better see what the hell, and though tiny, his head was triangular like that of a pit viper, all the more beautiful for its perfect, gemlike tininess.

It was morning and still cool, so he'd been racked out since dawn after a night on the new job, and had not expected an interruption to his snaky dreams. However, I already had his former roof in my hand and was not going to put it back because I'm restacking this firewood so get over it, was the thoughtwave. After a loaded pause (Hey, I got venom you know...) he did the reptilian version of Good Grief..., slithered slowly to the ground and huffed off into the downmountain underbrush to find a new place to crash and not be interrupted by one of these crazy, legged creatures.

Not long after, as I was stacking the new wood I could have sworn I heard some tiny snake snores, but that was probably just the bamboo leaves rubbing in the breeze.

GOOD EXAMPLE

Thinking later about the mamushi experience I posted about a couple days ago, I remembered an early Spring morning a few years ago when, as I opened the front door heading out on my way to work in the big city, for some reason I looked down - I suppose attracted by the sort of glow there - and saw, where the bottom of the door had just been, a bright tiny being of some sort, body artistically arranged.

I hunkered down to get a closer look and observed that it was a young snake, a completely new snake in fact, probably just hatched, only a few inches long, splendid in that way only nature can be splendid in such miniature, with a luminescent silver-blue-gray body spotted at regular intervals along its back with dark brown.

It seemed to glow there in the shadow of the doorway, where it lay without reacting either to my removal of its protective roof or to my subsequent motion. It was less than six inches long but fully developed, having likely hatched into the new world late yesterday evening and crawled off randomly into the dimming light, winding up under our door for protection from the unfamiliar night, where it had gotten chilled and stiff. It was warming up, though.

I poked at it with a stick to get it to move and it reared its tiny head, ready to strike with tiny fangs, just like a big tough guy - looked a bit comical under the circs - but I knew then that it was indeed a baby mamushi, which are at home in bamboo groves, not in driveways leading to under doors. He was clearly a lost newbie who had just hatched and gotten lost. But I didn't want him to begin feeling at home anywhere around the house.

From my woodsy life in upstate NY I knew that you don't touch even newborn pit vipers (like the rattler), so I grabbed the lost newbie at the neck with a pair of long bamboo cooking chopsticks, carried him a good way down the road to the edge of the big wild bamboo grove and tossed the little fellow into paradise.

God should be so nice.

ONE BIG SECRET

A couple of days ago on a cloudy afternoon I went outside to see how much the lemongrass had grown. As I approached the place, I saw a young snake lazing on a board, getting what little sun there was.

There was something different about the snake though: it wasn’t the usual bright-striped, shiny garden snake, that coils perkily and disappears like a whiplash and all you see is the tail. As I drew nearer, this somewhat flattened, relaxed snake departed, but at his leisure-- not in the garden snake fright-hurry way at all, but with a fluid, casual, muscular self-assurance. Its color was mind-stirring as well, a choppy dark brown ringed here and there with a slightly lighter reddish-brown.

It was the unhurriedness that sent the message that first gave me pause, made me stand still to observe the manner, the fluidity, the weightiness, the snaky sauntering bravado-- what was it exactly, apart from the fact that I’d never seen such a snake around here before-- it seemed to exude power, it had an attitude of unafraid strength-- it knew something, it knew one big secret. It was not afraid, it was confidently cautious.

Late the next afternoon I went out on the deck, merely leaned over the railing to look at the spot and there the snake was again, like a puddle of clay. As soon as my head showed, the snake became alert, and made to move away; though I was downwind, it had sensed me; it must be a pit viper, sensing my heat even while dozing in the sun, and that brought it to alertness. That meant it must be a mamushi, Japan’s only poisonous snake. I looked it up on the net, and there it was. Up to 60cm in length.

In all the years here I've never seen one; they rarely move about in the daytime. It probably drifted here because of the paddy repair going on across the road. I suppose once I clear that overgrown area the snake will move elsewhere. It doesn't seem to care that I'm the "actual owner" of the land, or that it is keeping mice under control for me, maybe even monkeys too, for which I hope it senses my gratitude.

I probably won't see it again for another 15 years.

VISION TALE

Talking with my upmountain neighbor the other day, he was out trimming snowbroken branches from the cedars and some from the oaks (the acorns do a day-and-night-drum-roll on his roof every autumn, something to think about if you're thinking of building near oaks) and I was out checking the shiitake for more buttons, getting some ginger (keeps real well when just left in the ground, I learned this year) and greens, and pondering a place for the bay tree, which is getting too big for its container, will have to be planted-- preferably soon-- when his and my paths converged near the tree line and he told me that the other morning he looked out his kitchen window at the back and there was a multipoint buck an arm's length away, eating acorns from the ground. Trying to be as quiet as possible, he ran for his video camera but when he got back the buck was gone. That's probably the same deerfellow that dined so crudely on my biwa tree.

I look out my windows all the time, seen monkeys, pheasants, ferrets, quail, mamushi, raccoons and rabbits, but I've never seen a deer. Or a bear or a wild pig, though they're around here too, and I'll probably see them all, sooner or later. But my neighbor, who has just moved here from the city, was way more excited by the encounter than the deer was, and now because he couldn't get his camera in time, when he visits his friends in the big urb he'll have to find the words to do the vision justice in telling them the story of his forest spirit, the same way such stories have always been told by seers vouchsafed visions, the tellers of tales to be remembered, for a million years before such stories led to us...