Instinct

The folks that say humans have bred all their instincts out . . . I officially don't believe 'em.

Kendra and I went out to the hot tub tonight (my neck hurts like hell). As we walked back I heard a sound that my brain identified as a sprinkler going off, or maybe a broken water pipe. Every hair on the back of my neck rose. Kendra took half a step back, and that was when I finally saw the rattlesnake.

It was in a pool of shadow, about eight feet from our stairs, and Kendra says she saw it before it rattled. Me, exhausted ninny that I am, I was looking up at the moonset. It was only a baby--about the width of a garden hose, and I'm guessing around two or two-and-a-half feet long. We were maybe eight or ten feet away, ourselves. We backed off, and it started coming toward us, so we went off into the parking lot. It headed for the other end of the patio and we went on up the stairs.

This is the closest I've been to a rattlesnake in my life, but only by about two feet. The other time, I was hiking, and my hiking partner and I stood fifteen feet off and threw rocks near it until it decided to take a nap somewhere else. It's not the experience itself that freaked me out, really. It's not even the fact that it was maybe fifty feet from our front door. The creepy thing for me was that feeling of the hair rising on the back of my head, and even though my conscious mind kept identifying that sound as something else, some part of my brain already knew it was a rattlesnake and was reacting as such.