The Anaconda

         The heat of the central California afternoon makes you love a shade tree. You might find a water oak here and there, as you follow a rural road. If someone is coming to pick you up in their truck, wait for them under the oak tree, because it is many degrees cooler in the shade. Be warned, however. You might get a bad scare.

         You'll be sitting there enjoying the shade, and maybe you will start to notice a faint hissing, scraping sound. Sharp little snapping sounds. It's all coming from the tree. Really big insects? Is that why the base of the tree looks eaten, hollowed out...is it infested with some kind of parasites?

         Suddenly, out of the corner of your eye, you see light brown, speckled movement near the tree's wounded footings. Your mind quickly puts the hissing and movement together and comes up with: Snake. Now you're not hot anymore; your heart is pumping ice water through you, with what feels like the force of a Napa Valley irrigation pump. You can't move. You're not supposed to move, though. That's what you've always heard--stay still as a rock--the snake won't strike unless you move. Not as if you could move if you wanted to.

         Snake! And what a snake...you can't take your eyes off your own doom, staring at the moving speckles and delicate grids and stripes, brown on brown, undulating within the tree. It's huge. It must be a python, or an Anaconda. Yes, a California Anaconda. Look at the diameter of that snake all coiled up--it must be thirty feet long, with fangs the size of the fish-filleting knives at Moro Bay! You have to get out of here. But you can't. You're frozen solid, in the middle of July. Frozen with terror.

         You did find the little snapping sounds just a bit inconsistent with your mental Snake profile, though, and now, you're beginning to register some more incongruities. The scales of the Anaconda are fluffing out from the body from time to time. The breeze is ruffling them as if they are soft, like...feathers? And then, you finally make out the little eyes. Not the cold, steady, otherworldly eyes of a snake, in one big snake head, but bunches of little black round eyes, each pair set on either side of a little curved beak. It's the beaks that are snapping, warning you to stay away. Stay away from the nest!

         It's a nest full of half-grown barn owl chicks, you City Slicker! Here comes your ride--don't tell him about your scare, or he'll wreck the truck laughing.