A couple years ago I was hiking. Most rattlers slither away quickly.
I was going down hill on hot day, and there was a huge rattler all coiled up on the trailing, spitting his tongue at me aggressively. I had never seen one do that. I did not go near him.
Yikes! Rattles terrify me! We don’t have so many here, but my uncle in Arizona sometimes sends me pics of rattlers sunning themselves in his back yard (shudder). The common baddies here are copperheads. At least you can smell them when you get in their proximity and get the check away (it’s a weird cucumberish smell). Rattles are just plain creepy.
The funny thing about my encounter with the humongous King Cobra. I thought his tail end was just a tree root. Well, duh. I was walking through a palm grove. No surface tree roots! So dumb. Even dumber, I walked through that grove nearly every other day to get to my little “private beach” on the island (private because there were three graves of shipwreck victims there and the locals were afraid of their ghosts — ghosts are a big deal there).
I could always hear gobs of snakes slithering up there in the palms, and thinking they were some sort of harmless Emerald Boa (duh again — not native to SE Asia — they were actually palm vipers), paid no mind to them, even thought them beautiful and charming.
Then, months later, one happened to fall out of a palm overhanging the sandy path we jokingly called “Main Street” on the island, that led from my Robinson Crusoe stilt shack to our office. Plop. Right smack dab in the middle of “Main Street”. Everyone froze. Sudden total quiet on a minor holiday weekend when more people than usual out. There she was, all coiled, beautiful brilliant green, head raised in strike position — yep, palm viper!
A little kid, just under two years old, bounded forward from just behind me. I put out my right hand and caught him in the chest, somehow a reflex thing, even while I was still in the process of realizing this was a Big Bad Danger. Somehow,the little kid got it, and remained in place, stuck like glue to the palm of my hand. Parents behind me let put breath in relief, but that was the only sound. Everyone still just frozen. After a few minutes, some brave young man hurled a push cart from the dock toward the angry freaked-out snake, and she slithered back up her tree, and life on the island returned to normal. Whew!
But walking through that palm grove never felt the same again!