14
AS MUCH AS RAFF loved the creatures of Nokobee, none of his fellow citizens there loved him back. All of the birds, lizards, and mammals were frightened by even his most cautious approach. They either moved along to keep their distance or else they tensed, ready to run or fly to safety in a split second. Except for an occasional snake or turtle rendered torpid by a winter chill, or a frog hiding among waterweeds, he found it almost impossible to stalk and touch an animal of any kind. Surely they would be pleased to see this giant intruder fall down dead. And if he did perish at Nokobee, a dozen kinds of scavengers would come to fight over his body, rendering it down to the last fragments of flesh and skin, until only the skeleton was left, and that too would in time be strewn about by scavengers and covered in humus by rivulets of the unfeeling rain.
Nokobee was nevertheless perfectly safe for people. Well, almost perfectly safe. You could walk the length and breadth of the tract for days or weeks, step anywhere, come close to any object that caught your eye, and suffer no ill consequence. Statistically, however, if you came back enough times and stayed cumulatively long enough, and if you were consistently careless to boot, then in a flash, and likely for some mundane reason, Nokobee could cripple or kill you.
One day, when he was fifteen years old, a few weeks after his trip with Junior Cody down the Chicobee, Raphael Semmes Cody learned this harsh lesson of cumulative probability. While taking one of his frequent hikes around the lake, he saw an unusual animal submerged in shallow water a foot from the shore. It appeared to be a medium-sized frog with a dark cross-shaped pattern on its back. This was the kind of discovery Raff was primed to make. Totally focused, he stepped close and slowly extended a hand to seize what now was certainly an animal of an unfamiliar kind. At the last moment he was surprised to see a large cottonmouth moccasin less than a foot from the frog. The snake, coiled in a clump of sedges, was evidently stalking the same animal.
In an eye blink there it was, all very familiar in form but in a new context, terrifying, seen from this close monstrous in size, the body woven through the aquatic stems of the sedges, the tawny bands of its species spaced along its blackish brown flanks, the coarse keeled scales of its upper surface fitted together like armor, and dry, not slimy or wet. The triangular head was swollen behind by the poison-filled oral glands, the mouth fixed in a mirthless smile. In another eye blink the snake lunged, its head coming like a spearpoint on the uncoiling neck and straight and fast as though a stone thrown by a hand. The maw opened wide, its lining dead white as shaded snow. The fangs unfolded and unsheathed, transforming the whole of the snake into a perfect predator, an instrument of death. In reflex Raff started to pull back but could move his hand no more than an inch or two when the snake struck.
Its fangs did not hit Raff directly. They passed through the top of one of the rolled cuffs of his shirt, spurting venom on the cloth instead of into flesh. Then they became entangled in the cloth as the moccasin tried to pull them out. In an instant the snake gnashed its jaws a second time, and Raff jerked his arm all the way back, causing the tips of both of the fangs to scratch the skin on his wrist as the cottonmouth pulled free.
There followed a splash and a swirl of water, and both the snake and frog were gone, each in a different direction. Raff fell back, squirming away from the lake edge with a frantic push of arms and legs. The enormity of what had happened, spanning less than five seconds, was stamped crystalline-clear in his mind, and it would remain so forever. He felt the rush of adrenaline, and his mind dissolved into a confused jumble. He'd been bitten by a deadly snake! Not a full strike, but the venom-laden fangs had broken the skin. He had no idea what was to follow. He might faint before he could make it out of Nokobee and find help. He might die. He got up and started to walk back to the trailhead. Don't run, he remembered, that would speed up the heart and circulate venom through his body faster. What about getting the venom out? He stopped and sucked on the scratches for a few seconds. He had a knife, and he thought maybe he could cut into the scratches and suck the blood from around them. Then he remembered reading that this old method doesn't work very well. It could even push the venom more deeply into the bloodstream.
The bite of a big poisonous snake is, next to drowning, the most feared natural cause of death in the wildlands of the Gulf Coastal Plain, although, that said, very few people actually die from it. Raff often considered the possibility of such an attack. His fantasy usually featured a diamondback rattlesnake coiled and camouflaged among dead leaves, poised to strike before you knew it was there. But he didn't think it would ever happen to him.
He stared at the two inch-long scratches on his wrist with all the detachment he could muster, as he walked slowly and carefully back to the trailhead. Every minute or so he held his arm up to look for signs of swelling. He waited for numbness to creep into his hand and arm and next into his body, slowly paralyzing and strangling him. But nothing happened. Maybe, he thought, the cottonmouth had failed to inject venom into his bloodstream. Finally he reached the trailhead, and lifted up his bicycle. His heart still pounded and his hands trembled, but he suffered no faintness or nausea, or any other symptom. He rehearsed the event in his mind as he rode on into Clayville. He had mostly calmed down by the time he reached home. He did not tell his parents about the incident, then or ever.
Raff folded the moccasin encounter into his lifelong experience in the Nokobee. In time it became part of the whole. As this and the many other memories piled one upon the other, his devotion to the tract became stronger, but also more realistic. From his passion for Nokobee's wildness, he drew his version of the land ethic. Where farmers love the land for what it yields to their labor, and hunters love it for the animals they kill and take away, Raff came to love Nokobee for its own sake. It became to him another way to look at the world, different than what he heard at school and from his parents. He constructed a broader context in which he drew a picture of humanity, and of himself. The image was at first vague, but it grew thereafter steadily in clarity. In time he understood that nature was not something outside the human world. The reverse is true. Nature is the real world, and humanity exists on islands within it.