That's All Folks
(Page 2 of 3)
November/December 1990
BY DOUG ELLIOTT
Every day we would go out and lift the board just enough to check on them. Whenever friends visited we took them over to see "our" snakes—an awesome sight indeed, as they raised their heads and calmly peered out at us, their tongues flickering curiously above the sprawl of glistening black coils. We noted the bulge in the one snake's body. Even after a week the lump seemed to be the same size.
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One morning our friend T.J. came to see us. She is a city apartment dweller who visits us regularly. She wanted to see the snakes, so right after breakfast we went out to the board. On the way, as we passed the chicken coop, we told her that when we had gotten the chickens the month before, we had placed a fake plastic egg in the nesting box as a "nest egg" to encourage the hens to lay there. Strangely, the egg had disappeared. We couldn't find it anywhere, even after we cleaned out the coop.
"The snake ate it," she said with conviction.
"No!" I protested, not even wanting to consider such weirdness in my own backyard. "A snake wouldn't be stupid enough to swallow a plastic egg . . . would it?"
"If a chicken's stupid enough to sit on a plastic egg," she retorted, "then why wouldn't a snake swallow one?"
We lifted the board up. That was all the proof T.J. needed. "There's your egg, right in that snake," she said.
I lowered the board, still not wanting to accept the obvious. It had been weeks since the plastic egg disappeared. I hated the thought that this unfortunate, instinct-bound creature was suffering from a Grade A hunk of plastic lodged in its gut all this time. Nor could I think about the additional suffering I would cause if I made some clumsy attempt at surgery.
Procrastinating was doing no good. I knew I had to act. I reached down and captured the snake. Often, when first caught, a wild snake will struggle or strike defensively, but this one was as gentle as could be. I felt the lump in its body. Sure enough: This was no half-digested rodent—it was exactly the size and shape of our missing plastic hen's egg. The snake was six feet long, the egg lodged 32 inches from the head—almost in the middle.
