With (40 page)

I aint got ary,
he said.
Ole Adam has one, which is right before Christmas, but I’m jist his remainder, don’t ye know? I don’t never get no older, so I don’t have birthdays.

Do you mean you’ll be twelve all your life? Hreapha asked him.

The
in-habit
chuckled.
All my “life” aint exactly the way to put it. But I’ll never change a whit.

That August, without leaving his haunt, that is, within barking distance of the house, the
in-habit
helped Hreapha find a rotting stump where a mother king snake (
Ort to be called a queen snake, I reckon
) had laid a clutch of nearly a dozen eggs in a pile of loose damp stuff. The oblong eggshells were white like chicken eggs, but not brittle; they were tough and leathery.

How do you know the eggs are king snakes’ and not rattlesnakes’ or copperheads’? Hreapha asked.

Them pizen snakes don’t lay no eggs. They just have live babies the same way you do.

Hreapha told all her offspring about the plan for Mistress’ birthday, and asked them to take turns watching the snake eggs to see when they hatched.

Shoot far, exclaimed Hrolf. What if the mother snake comes around to keep a watch on her eggs?

The
in-habit
explained that snake mothers don’t ever pay any attention to their eggs once they’re laid, nor do the baby snakes ever get any attention from their parents.
Pore things is all on their own.
He also explained how the baby snake has a tiny but sharp “egg tooth” on the tip of its snout which it uses to slit the eggshell so it can escape.

Of the dogs, only Hruschka would have nothing to do with the eggs, for she had a morbid fear of snakes that she would never overcome. Hreapha herself was on watch when the first hatchling emerged, so tiny, hardly bigger than a worm, and totally helpless. How do they nurse? Hreapha wanted to know.

They sure don’t drink milk, not that I know of. By and by they’ll be able to catch little critters and eat ’em, but for now your best bet is to see if you caint find some baby mice to feed ’em. Or little lizards. Or tree frogs.

Hreapha instructed her dogs to help in rounding up sufficient lizards, frogs and baby mice to feed the newly hatched snakes. They left the snakes alone with their food overnight, because snakes don’t like to be disturbed while they’re feeding.

Hreapha then had to decide which one of the several hatchlings to capture and present to Robin. Do we want a male snake or a female snake? she asked the
in-habit
. And how can I tell them apart?

Iffen I had fingers and thumbs I could tell ye,
he said.
And you don’t have fingers nor thumbs neither. Ralgrub has got ’em, and I could try to explain to her how to sex a snake, but maybe you’d better just take your chances on getting a female.

Why a female?

Hreapha could hear the
in-habit
hemming and hawing. Being the smartest of the animals hereabouts did not endow her with the ability to understand right away what would eventually occur to her: that a snake, being symbolically phallic, would be even more suggestive as a male. Especially to a ten-year-old girl who was just a year or two short of puberty, and who spent all the hot summer in a state of nakedness like all the other creatures on the place (except possibly the
in-habit
, and Hreapha decided that invisible clothing didn’t count anyhow). Robin was as totally lacking in self-consciousness about her nakedness as she was about her singing. She had a lovely voice, and she sang all the time, although more often than not she did not sing any actual words of a song, but just pure tones in some kind of melodic chant. Her voice must have carried to the far reaches of the haunt. Except for Hrolf, who seemed to appreciate it, and of course Hrolf’s mother, the other dogs found Robin’s singing objectionable, and usually ran off into the woods to get away from it.

If Hreapha had given full thought to the sexual allusions of snakes, she’d have gone ahead with her plan to give Robin a fawn for her birthday. But she’d already gone to the trouble to prepare a cage of sorts for the new pet: there was a discarded two-gallon glass jar in the trash that the garbage detail would have buried, but Hreapha rescued it, and rolled it with her nose out to one of the stalls in the barn, where she managed, with help from Hrolf, to get it into a vertical position. Now that the bunch of baby snakes had been more than adequately fed as a result of all the dogs’ round-up of tiny rodents and reptiles and amphibians, to the extent that they were beginning to crawl away from their nest, Hreapha selected the prettiest hatchling, to the extent that snakes can be pretty, and, hoping it was female, transported it gently in her jaws to its new home in the glass jar in the barn. For the next few weeks the dogs regularly dropped assorted baby mice, lizards, and frogs into the jar, until Robin turned ten.

Ma! hollered Hrolf one morning. That snake has done turned itself inside out!

The
in-habit
was summoned to inspect the damage, which wasn’t damage after all but simply, according to the
in-habit
, a shedding of the skin, and the snake would shed its skin once again before Robin’s birthday. The
in-habit
explained to them all that it was the only way the snake could grow. It had to shed its skin to get larger. And they were feeding it so much that it was getting large fast. It looked already like a miniature version of the six-footer it would become; it had the same markings: black with white and yellow crossbands that forked on the sides and ran into each other. It was indeed a pretty creature.

The day arrived for Robin’s birthday, and the
in-habit
persuaded her to use one of the last boxes of cake mix to make herself a birthday cake. Hreapha overheard their conversation.

“That would be selfish,” Robin said. “Making a birthday cake for yourself.”

How’s that any more selfish than anything else you do for yourself that you have to do because there’s nobody to do it for you?

All the inhabitants, including the
in-habit
, were invited to the birthday party, and each was given a piece of the cake. Ralgrub and Robert especially enjoyed the cake, and the dogs, although they didn’t have sweet teeth, dutifully ate a piece each.

Robin cut one more piece and held it up to the air. “This is your piece, Adam, but I’ll just have to eat it for you.” And she ate Adam’s piece.

Mmmm,
moaned the
in-habit
,
that was sure scrumdiddlyumptious. And now if you’ll kindly foller your dogs out to the barn, they’ve got a real present for you.

“Oh, really?” said Robin. She heeded the invitation and followed them out to the barn.

“Hreapha! Hreapha!” exclaimed Hreapha, that is, Happy Birthday! And just look what we’ve got for you!

“Eeek!” exclaimed Robin. “It’s a snake!” And she backed away from the glass jar.

Hit’s a shore-enough king snake,
said the
in-habit
.
The masterest snake there is. Won’t do you no harm, but it’ll slay any pizen snakes that try to come around. Some folks call it a chain snake on account of them markings that look like links in a chain.

“What kind of birthday present is a
snake
?” Robin demanded. “I can’t pet it.”

Pet it all you like,
said the
in-habit
.
Go ahead, stick your hand in the jar and take aholt of it real gentle-like. I guarantee she won’t bite you.

“She?” said Robin. “Is it a girl snake?” Robin slowly and cautiously put her hand into the jar and took hold of the snake and lifted it out of the jar and cradled it in her arms the same way she would cradle any other infant. The snake squirmed and wiggled to get loose from her grasp, but it soon settled down.

I can tell ye how to find out,
the
in-habit
said, and he instructed her in a procedure called “popping” whereby she turned the snake over to locate its afterplace and then pressed or “popped” in a certain place to see if it had the snake’s equivalent of a penis. It didn’t.
So I reckon it’s a female, sure enough,
the
in-habit
said.

“Then how can you call it a ‘king’ snake?” Robin wanted to know.

You got me there,
he said.
I never heared tell of no queen snake, though, but it appears that’s what you’ve got.

So Robin decided to name her snake The Queen of Sheba, explaining there was a woman of that name in her book called the Bible who had brought rich treasures to King Solomon.

They all called the snake Sheba for short, and everybody lived happily ever after.

No, that wasn’t true, Hreapha realized. Sheba was going to live for many, many years, and in no time Robin had made friends with her, so much so that after Sheba’s eighth shedding of her skin they could release her from the glass jar and she wouldn’t try to run away and they didn’t have to feed her any more. She kept the whole haunt free of mice and rats, even to the extent of depriving Robert of part of his food supply, so that he had to roam farther and farther into the woods for his supper, although on at least two occasions he saved Sheba’s life, once by killing an owl that attempted to prey upon her, and the other time by killing an opposum also bent upon making a meal of Sheba. Sheba had a number of natural predators, including skunks and coyotes. She established her throne in the stall of the barn where she’d grown up, and she could usually be found there, where Robin often visited her and enjoyed picking her up and holding her and even wrapping her around her neck or waist. King snakes—and in this case a queen snake—are constrictors, and they capture and kill their prey, including the poisonous snakes, by wrapping themselves around the prey and squeezing it to death. Sheba’s squeezes on Robin were gentle and sensuous.

Hreapha understood that sex was the most important part of every creature, that all creatures lived in order to mate, and thus mating had been intended to be a main source of pleasure. She herself never again came into heat—something had gone wrong during her first and only experience at birthing, and whatever internal triggers or switches consume and devote the body to procreation were no longer operative in her—but she still enjoyed observing the manifold manifestations of love in all other creatures, including her own offspring. Recently Hreapha had witnessed an act that she had been suspecting for some time: Robert was not merely a constant companion and mentor to his protégé Hroberta but had also become her lover. Hreapha didn’t mind; she thought it was cute. And it couldn’t result in Hroberta’s pregnancy and overpopulation of the premises. But when Hroberta’s sister Hruschka also went into heat, she simply disappeared. Hreapha could only assume that Hruschka, who was the quietest and shyest of her offspring, was neither willing to discuss her feelings with her mother nor willing to have one of her brothers or Robert put her passion to rest, so she wandered off in search of succor elsewhere in the world. Hreapha wondered if she might have managed to reach Stay More and even unknowingly mated with her father, Yowrfrowr. Or, more likely, she had encountered the pack of coyotes who roamed these hills. Or perhaps she had headed north and found other dogs somewhere. They were all sad to lose her, and they hoped that she might come home after she had been bred, but she never did.

Her three brothers began to pester their mother to allow them to attempt to find Stay More, not just to search for Hruschka but also to meet their father. Hreapha had promised to take Hrolf on his first birthday to see Yowrfrowr, but the birthday had come and gone and Hreapha had never been able to overcome her fear that the journey was no longer possible…although it wasn’t inconceivable that Hruschka had somehow accomplished it. But now she had another motive for making the attempt, in addition to all her other motives, not least of which was her desire to see dear Yowrfrowr again.

So, in the early springtime, not long after the dogs’ second birthday and thus, she told them, worth considering as a belated birthday present, she took them to see if they could find Stay More. Hroberta wanted to go too, but Robert dissuaded her. Of course Hreapha explained her destination and itinerary to the
in-habit
, who in turn explained it to Robin.

“Don’t go, Hreapha!” Robin said to her. “I’ll worry about you. It’s dangerous. Have you forgotten the last time you tried it?”

“Hreapha,” she said, that is, No, I certainly haven’t forgotten, but that time I was all alone and this time I have my three big boys to help me.

Leave her to give it a try,
the
in-habit
urged Robin.
They can allus turn back if the going’s too rough.
Then in parting he said to Hreapha,
You’ll just have to find some way to skirt around that there drop-off in the trail where it goes straight down near the waterfall.

Which indeed proved to be their downfall, in both senses of the word.

But before they even reached it, they encountered another obstacle: the coyotes. There weren’t five of them, or not the same five who had raped Hreapha, but only four. The four of them circled Hreapha and her three boys, and the eight dogs went through the formalities of sniffing each other’s afterplaces. She did not recognize, or could not recall the specific scent, of any of them. They were especially curious about the scent of Yipyip, and he was equally curious about them.

He looked at her. Ma, am I any kin to these guys?

She did not say, as she was tempted to, One of them might be your father. Instead she said, They’re coyotes, and you’ve probably got some coyote in you.

In their guttural language the coyotes began conversing among themselves, perhaps debating whether to attack. Yipyip listened with great interest, and almost seemed to understand them, which Hreapha couldn’t do.

Ma, Hrolf said to her, would you mind if I took a bite out of one of these bastards?