The Man and the Snake

The light was dull, the sun was covered by many overlapping clouds, and the mountain was small. But enough rays passed through the clouds to light the land. One could open his eyes without squinting. Birds scavenged the ground for food and a man on the mountain with flint and tinder sparked a fire to cook his beans. While the beans were heating in a stone bowl, the man stabbed a cactus and caught its dew in a wooden cup. Its taste was sweet like the morning. He ate the beans, gulped some more dew, and went on a walk. The air was cool and his thoughts were simple. Life bustled. He enjoyed the land and wondered of the rabbits and of the coyotes, but not of the snakes. The snakes were the vilest of creatures. Their tongues flickered in and out of their mouths and the scales on their bellies were cold. They slithered over rocks with guile. He finished the walk of two miles, wiped his sweaty face with a bit of cloth, and grazed his beard, sundried and fringed, with his fingertips.

The sun went away and the man rebuilt the fire. He looked up to the moon and sang of his joys and of his woes, but mostly of his loneliness. The crackling of the fire went down and the sting in his eyes was soothed by the moonlight. To the distant howl of many coyotes and the fuzzy hum of many bugs, the man fell asleep. The night was calm. He dreamt of many gods; he dreamt of many beasts; he dreamt of many abstractions.

At the end of a dream with the satisfaction of victory over his enemies, the man awoke. He felt vigorous and decided to walk this morning before his first meal, and to route a new path. The new path was dangerous and it sheered and it coiled; it was a challenge. On the third step on the new path, the man tripped on a stone and tumbled several meters down a hill. The man laid there faced down and shook, feeling a burn where the air flowed past the cuts on his back. The sun had gotten brighter without his notice. He rolled over, squinted at the sun, grunted, clamped his jaws together, and pumped breath out from his lungs to his mouth and through the slits between his teeth. He laid there for another hour.

A curious snake slithered across a long sheet of black rock towards the man. The man was lying to wait for his cuts to dry and did not notice. He felt the cold belly of the snake against his leg and he heard a hiss. The man had no energy to flee. The snake coiled round the man’s body and stopped at the shoulder. The man raised his head and stared into the snake’s eyes. The snake stared back. For a moment, the man forgot the malice of the snake and the snake forgot the malice of the man. They stared without their expectations. The man got lost in the gaze; he became friends with the snake for a moment. The man raised his hand to stroke the snake’s head and it bit his hand.