In my early 20s, not long after moving back to Texas, I almost grabbed a rattlesnake.
I didn’t know it was a rattlesnake at the time. I was out walking in a riverside forest outside Austin, exploring a set of long-abandoned buildings in search of reptiles. Spotting a gray-scaled loop of coil poking from a tangle of fallen roofing, I bent automatically to snatch it. But some competing instinct froze my hand. Staring at the coil, I traced it back into the shadows, where the snub-nosed, wary face of a pit viper stared back. Then came the rattle: a short, emphatic buzz that dried my mouth and made me step smartly backward.
The serpent in question was an adult western diamondback. Of the 10 species of rattler found in Texas, it is the largest—record-holders can hit 7 feet, though 3 to 4 is standard—and by far the most common. It’s also the most famous. Diamondbacks play an outsize role in the Lone Star mythology: “Somehow talk about him seems bigger than elsewhere,” observed the folklorist J. Frank Dobie in Rattlesnakes, his 1965 compendium of state rattler lore. In many of these stories, informants recall rattlers as the menace of the rangeland, the creeping foe of the cowboy: a cold, unthinking set of venomous fangs, forever cocked, loaded, seeking the unwary ankle. “It is an unwritten law [among cowboys],” Dobie wrote, “that whoever sees a rattlesnake will kill it.”
