The Snake, the Egg, and I

Back when I used to keep hens, gathering eggs was my favorite job. As the evening sun streamed through the coop’s dusty windows, my buff-colored, matronly layers would wander around muttering to themselves, debating what to do next—scratch some litter, eat some grain, go to roost for the night? Addressing them in a friendly tone, I would reach into the nests, retrieve the day’s harvest, and place it in my basket.

But one day I walked into the coop and found, sitting on a clutch of rosy-brown eggs, not a hen, but a snake. This was no skinny garter snake, but a full-grown black snake, sleek and shiny and as big around as a pitchfork handle. She was draped over the clutch like a skein, and she had a whole, intact egg in her mouth, which she managed thanks to her species’ ability to stretch the ligaments between the two halves of the lower jaw. There she sat, her tiny head barely visible around the huge egg, staring at me and trying hard to swallow her prize.

I am not particularly brave, but when I saw that snake helping herself to my eggs, I saw red. I ran to the kitchen and seized the spaghetti tongs. Back in the coop I grasped the snake behind her head with the tongs and pried the egg from her jaws with my other hand. Then I carried her to the woods behind the coop, where she disappeared into the leaf litter. I took the eggs to the house, put them in the fridge, and trembled a little.

Next day, the snake was back on the nest.

This time she had managed to swallow an egg, and I could see its shape just behind her head, starting its slow descent into her stomach. The nerve! I hissed. I didn’t run for the tongs, but grabbed the snake with my bare hands and took off for the woods. I put her down firmly and told her not to come back.

But she did, and when I found her on the nest again I took hold of her and hurled her as hard as I could into the woods. And that time she stayed away.

A day later, the mice arrived. At first there was only one, an adorable little field mouse straight out of Beatrix Potter, all ears and sparkly eyes, watching me as I refilled the hens’ feeder. The next day there were two, scurrying along the top of a hay bale. The third day—I could smell them as soon as I entered the coop—there were mice everywhere, running on the windowsill, scrabbling across the floor, leaving droppings on everything.

What, I wondered, was behind this plague? It took me a while to figure out that the mice had moved in because the snake had moved out. In my ignorance, I had chased away the heaven-sent, poison-free, green solution to the mouse problem, and the mice knew it.

Too late I repented my callous treatment of my friend, the black snake. She stayed away a long time, and during that period I fought the mice with traps and peppermint spray and verbal abuse, and lost. But next spring the dog found a dried-out snake skin of impressive length under a bush. A couple of days later, the mice disappeared. And once again I found the snake in the nest, looking shiny and soignée in her brand-new skin.

This time I welcomed her. So what if some days she was draped over the eggs like a broody hen? I would chat to her softly and she would let me push aside her coils, occasionally darting her tongue at me, the way a hen will make pecking motions when you get the eggs out from under her.

I miss those crazy days spent in the presence of beasts both wild and domestic, when I never knew what awaited me on the other side of the kitchen door.