Last night, the cat, the coyote and I were on a walk in the pasture when we stumbled upon a giant snake curled up next to a bush. I leapt straight into the air, and pulled Charlie to a safe distance, but the damn cat crouched into pounce-pose right in front of the snake, which, coiled up, was the size of a platter. There are two kinds of snakes here – rattlesnakes and bull snakes, and they look identical except that bull snakes have a pointed tail instead of a rattle. Bull snakes are harmless, whereas a rattlesnake bite can kill a 1000-pound horse. <\/p>\n
The snake was making a rattling noise, but a bull snake’s hiss mimics a rattle – it’s one of their defenses. This snake was rattling like crazy, and I was straining to determine what kind of snake it was from my distance of about four feet away but I couldn’t see the end of it’s tail. I was frantically calling to the cat while maintaining a death grip on Charlie who was clamoring to be part of the action. <\/p>\n
As the snake’s head rose higher and higher into strike position, it’s tail uncoiled into view and it was pointed. Finally, I could breathe, and that was when the cat decided he was bored with the snake and casually walked over to join Charlie and me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Last night, the cat, the coyote and I were on a walk in the pasture when we stumbled upon a giant snake curled up next to a bush. I leapt straight into the air, and pulled Charlie to a safe distance, but the damn cat crouched into pounce-pose right in front of the snake, which, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5562,"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions\/5562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailycoyote.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}