第 七 章 · Chapter VII

Much as I liked Ántonia, I hated a superior tone that she sometimes

took with me. She was four years older than I, to be sure, and had seen

more of the world; but I was a boy and she was a girl, and I resented

her protecting manner. Before the autumn was over, she began to treat

me more like an equal and to defer to me in other things than reading

lessons. This change came about from an adventure we had together.

One day when I rode over to the Shimerdas’ I found Ántonia starting off

on foot for Russian Peter’s house, to borrow a spade Ambrosch needed. I

offered to take her on the pony, and she got up behind me. There had

been another black frost the night before, and the air was clear and

heady as wine. Within a week all the blooming roads had been despoiled,

hundreds of miles of yellow sunflowers had been transformed into brown,

rattling, burry stalks.

We found Russian Peter digging his potatoes. We were glad to go in and

get warm by his kitchen stove and to see his squashes and Christmas

melons, heaped in the storeroom for winter. As we rode away with the

spade, Ántonia suggested that we stop at the prairie-dog-town and dig

into one of the holes. We could find out whether they ran straight

down, or were horizontal, like mole-holes; whether they had underground

connections; whether the owls had nests down there, lined with

feathers. We might get some puppies, or owl eggs, or snakeskins.

The dog-town was spread out over perhaps ten acres. The grass had been

nibbled short and even, so this stretch was not shaggy and red like the

surrounding country, but grey and velvety. The holes were several yards

apart, and were disposed with a good deal of regularity, almost as if

the town had been laid out in streets and avenues. One always felt that

an orderly and very sociable kind of life was going on there. I

picketed Dude down in a draw, and we went wandering about, looking for

a hole that would be easy to dig. The dogs were out, as usual, dozens

of them, sitting up on their hind legs over the doors of their houses.

As we approached, they barked, shook their tails at us, and scurried

underground. Before the mouths of the holes were little patches of sand

and gravel, scratched up, we supposed, from a long way below the

surface. Here and there, in the town, we came on larger gravel patches,

several yards away from any hole. If the dogs had scratched the sand up

in excavating, how had they carried it so far? It was on one of these

gravel beds that I met my adventure.

We were examining a big hole with two entrances. The burrow sloped into

the ground at a gentle angle, so that we could see where the two

corridors united, and the floor was dusty from use, like a little

highway over which much travel went. I was walking backward, in a

crouching position, when I heard Ántonia scream. She was standing

opposite me, pointing behind me and shouting something in Bohemian. I

whirled round, and there, on one of those dry gravel beds, was the

biggest snake I had ever seen. He was sunning himself, after the cold

night, and he must have been asleep when Ántonia screamed. When I

turned, he was lying in long loose waves, like a letter ‘W.’ He

twitched and began to coil slowly. He was not merely a big snake, I

thought—he was a circus monstrosity. His abominable muscularity, his

loathsome, fluid motion, somehow made me sick. He was as thick as my

leg, and looked as if millstones couldn’t crush the disgusting vitality

out of him. He lifted his hideous little head, and rattled. I didn’t

run because I didn’t think of it—if my back had been against a stone

wall I couldn’t have felt more cornered. I saw his coils tighten—now he

would spring, spring his length, I remembered. I ran up and drove at

his head with my spade, struck him fairly across the neck, and in a

minute he was all about my feet in wavy loops. I struck now from hate.

Ántonia, barefooted as she was, ran up behind me. Even after I had

pounded his ugly head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding,

doubling and falling back on itself. I walked away and turned my back.

I felt seasick.

Ántonia came after me, crying, ‘O Jimmy, he not bite you? You sure? Why

you not run when I say?’

‘What did you jabber Bohunk for? You might have told me there was a

snake behind me!’ I said petulantly.

‘I know I am just awful, Jim, I was so scared.’ She took my

handkerchief from my pocket and tried to wipe my face with it, but I

snatched it away from her. I suppose I looked as sick as I felt.

‘I never know you was so brave, Jim,’ she went on comfortingly. ‘You is

just like big mans; you wait for him lift his head and then you go for

him. Ain’t you feel scared a bit? Now we take that snake home and show

everybody. Nobody ain’t seen in this kawntree so big snake like you

kill.’

She went on in this strain until I began to think that I had longed for

this opportunity, and had hailed it with joy. Cautiously we went back

to the snake; he was still groping with his tail, turning up his ugly

belly in the light. A faint, fetid smell came from him, and a thread of

green liquid oozed from his crushed head.

‘Look, Tony, that’s his poison,’ I said.

I took a long piece of string from my pocket, and she lifted his head

with the spade while I tied a noose around it. We pulled him out

straight and measured him by my riding-quirt; he was about five and a

half feet long. He had twelve rattles, but they were broken off before

they began to taper, so I insisted that he must once have had

twenty-four. I explained to Ántonia how this meant that he was

twenty-four years old, that he must have been there when white men

first came, left on from buffalo and Indian times. As I turned him

over, I began to feel proud of him, to have a kind of respect for his

age and size. He seemed like the ancient, eldest Evil. Certainly his

kind have left horrible unconscious memories in all warm-blooded life.

When we dragged him down into the draw, Dude sprang off to the end of

his tether and shivered all over—wouldn’t let us come near him.

We decided that Ántonia should ride Dude home, and I would walk. As she

rode along slowly, her bare legs swinging against the pony’s sides, she

kept shouting back to me about how astonished everybody would be. I

followed with the spade over my shoulder, dragging my snake. Her

exultation was contagious. The great land had never looked to me so big

and free. If the red grass were full of rattlers, I was equal to them

all. Nevertheless, I stole furtive glances behind me now and then to

see that no avenging mate, older and bigger than my quarry, was racing

up from the rear.

The sun had set when we reached our garden and went down the draw

toward the house. Otto Fuchs was the first one we met. He was sitting

on the edge of the cattle-pond, having a quiet pipe before supper.

Ántonia called him to come quick and look. He did not say anything for

a minute, but scratched his head and turned the snake over with his

boot.

‘Where did you run onto that beauty, Jim?’

‘Up at the dog-town,’ I answered laconically.

‘Kill him yourself? How come you to have a weepon?’

‘We’d been up to Russian Peter’s, to borrow a spade for Ambrosch.’

Otto shook the ashes out of his pipe and squatted down to count the

rattles. ‘It was just luck you had a tool,’ he said cautiously. ‘Gosh!

I wouldn’t want to do any business with that fellow myself, unless I

had a fence-post along. Your grandmother’s snake-cane wouldn’t more

than tickle him. He could stand right up and talk to you, he could. Did

he fight hard?’

Ántonia broke in: ‘He fight something awful! He is all over Jimmy’s

boots. I scream for him to run, but he just hit and hit that snake like

he was crazy.’

Otto winked at me. After Ántonia rode on he said: ‘Got him in the head

first crack, didn’t you? That was just as well.’

We hung him up to the windmill, and when I went down to the kitchen, I

found Ántonia standing in the middle of the floor, telling the story

with a great deal of colour.

Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first

encounter was fortunate in circumstance. My big rattler was old, and

had led too easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had

probably lived there for years, with a fat prairie-dog for breakfast

whenever he felt like it, a sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed,

perhaps, and he had forgot that the world doesn’t owe rattlers a

living. A snake of his size, in fighting trim, would be more than any

boy could handle. So in reality it was a mock adventure; the game was

fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for many a dragon-slayer. I

had been adequately armed by Russian Peter; the snake was old and lazy;

and I had Ántonia beside me, to appreciate and admire.

That snake hung on our corral fence for several days; some of the

neighbours came to see it and agreed that it was the biggest rattler

ever killed in those parts. This was enough for Ántonia. She liked me

better from that time on, and she never took a supercilious air with me

again. I had killed a big snake—I was now a big fellow.