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136 Snake Cruising II “Close your eyes and grab.” Kevin Messenger, herpetologist It was an oddly cool day for mid-May. The air was heavy and damp, and the sunset glowered a weird orange. I was motoring along Over-Flow Drive, a dirt back road to the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge, for a second snake hunt with Kevin Messenger. This time members of the North Carolina State University Herpetology Club were joining us. The wind whipped past as the sun set behind the woods. It felt good to be riding up to the refuge again with the rag top off my Jeep, and it would be good to ride with Kevin in his open Jeep too, talking and cruising into the night. It had been a dry spring, with many days red-flagged for wildfire alerts by the S.C. Forestry Commission. Legions of leafy, breast-high turkey oaks swarmed some tracts of longleaf pine. One recently burned tract, however, smelled smoky and fragrant, like the bowl of my great-grandfather’s pipe. Entering the refuge and zipping along Wildlife Drive, I caught up with a compact sedan. A hand reached out of the open passenger window and waved. I followed the car a couple of miles to Kevin’s house, the one on loan from the refuge. We parked, and Kevin and his friends Mike, Adrian, and Liani, carrying sandwiches and soft drinks from the Subway in McBee, piled out of their car. Nate, a fourth member of the team, soon arrived in a second car. They kindly offered to share supper. I told them I’d eaten. “You have to see inside the house,” Kevin said. “The place doesn’t look the same.” “You cleaned up?” I joked. We stepped inside and were met by Adrian’s dog. Remarkably the interior of the house was more of a wreck than it had been, and not just from Kevin’s Snake Cruising II 137 housekeeping. The refuge was remodeling. The carpet in the living room had been torn up, exposing more dingy gray linoleum. The walls were new, unpainted Sheetrock. Dust was everywhere. If a home expresses the character of its tenant, this was no exception. The house was in transition, and so was Kevin. He’d taken his finals at N.C. State. In a week, three days after he graduated, he would board a plane to central China and the Shennongjia National Forest Reserve, where for four months he would survey snakes for Dr. Craig Stanford and the University of Southern California and for Dr. Li Yiming and the Zoology Institute and Chinese Academy of Sciences. A couple of metal chairs stood with their backs to the kitchen wall. There must have been a kitchen table too, but everything was so stacked and cluttered with backpacks, camping gear, books, clothes, bottles, cans, and the detritus of college undergraduacy that I didn’t see one. Although Kevin had not been accepted yet into grad school, he hoped to use his research in China for his master’s thesis. Thumbtacked to a wall was an impressive poster outlining his research at the Carolina Sandhills NWR. The poster was a bare-bones draft of his future Ph.D. dissertation, he said. I gifted him two of my favorite reads of late—Archie Carr’s The Windward Road and Mark Plotkin’s Tales of Shaman’s Apprentice—books to leaf through on his trip to China. I laid them on a stack of other books next to an SOG sheath knife and a small Tupperware bowl. Sealed in the bowl was a single fang of a canebrake rattlesnake. “I took it from a big roadkill. It’s huge,” Kevin said, popping off the lid and handing me the bowl. The fang was beautiful, about three-quarters of an inch long. It looked like a tiny scimitar carved from ivory. I imagined that venom might still be lurking on it and handed the bowl back. “Last September I came across a baby canebrake DOR [dead on the road] near the south end of Wildlife Drive,” Kevin said. “I kept on driving. Six minutes later there was a fresh hit, a forty-nine-inch DOR canebrake. I pulled out one of the fangs to see how big it was.” While the others wolfed down their subs, Kevin delivered a minilecture on canebrake venom. “The tricky thing about canebrakes is that there are three venom types. Type A is the worst. Take Mojave...

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