Snakes, Oh My!

Snakes.  Should you be afraid of them?  Oh, yeah!  Since many are poisonous, every should be a little careful.  Poor Eve in the Garden of Eden didn't know to be afraid of that old serpent.  She DID know to be a little fearful of the tree!  Did you know that being afraid of snakes may be a part of the curse.  Just think about that enemy word in Genesis 3: 14- 15 and most women?

¹⁴ So the Lord God said to the serpent:

“Because you have done this,
You are cursed more than all cattle,
And more than every beast of the field;
On your belly you shall go,
And you shall eat dust
All the days of your life.
¹⁵ And I will put enmity
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her Seed;
He shall bruise your head,
And you shall bruise His heel.”

Just think about it!  Who are more afraid of snakes - girls or boys?  Over the years of my life in Brazil, I seen quite a few snakes.  Most weren't poisonous, by the way.  I always felt that I handled myself unlike a silly girl when it comes to snakes.  Let's not talk about rats!  I jump and squeal when I see a rat in my house.

Once when we first came to Bahia to live and to work at the island camp, the girl that helped me in the house came running out of the kitchen screaming something about a snake.  From the way she screamed I thought it must be huge and dangerous.  It was a small green snake.

I knew the boys would love to see it, so I told Fatima to grab a bucket and help me catch it.  She was scared stiff, but she got a bucket and a broom and at least blocked one of the escape routes so I could maneuver it into a good catching place.  We caught it.  She wasn't happy but learned to be a little less "girly."  {Which was good when it came to catching the iguana if you remember that from my other story.}

Once on the island we had a group of Americans who had come down to do some missions work for a two week trip.  The caretaker of the island had found a really big rattlesnake near the kitchen area and killed it.  The body was well over 6 feet long and very thick.  Some of the American men picked up the snake to take photos of it.  One even wrapped the dead snake around it's neck.  It was near night-time so when they were done with their picture taking fun, they left it on the ground.  The next morning they were surprised to see three dead mocós {big guinea pig type rodents} where the snake had been - and no snake!  The snake wasn't all the way dead while they were wrapping it all around their necks and taking all those pictures.  Sometime after they left and went to bed, the snake coughed up its last supper and moved on down the road!  The Americans were more cautious after that.

Another time I was at a retreat for women in another state.  One evening I was getting into my hammock for bed when I spied a little head hanging down from a rafter just over me.  It looked a lot like a rattlesnake head.  I didn't want to scare all the women, so I moved my hammock out from under the rafter and went on to sleep somewhere else.  The next day I told the camp director about the snake and asked if he would check it out.  He found a whole nest of babies and two big snakes.  Eeee!

 Not all snakes are bad.  Once Dalton saved a beautiful blue tree snake from the hands of boys on the island who were getting ready to stone it.  It was actually a semi-poisonous snake.  It had some poison to stun its prey but not to hurt people.  It had a special poison fang in the back of its throat to give birds a nice shock to help the snake swallow them down. 

There's a little something down below for you to learn more about snakes.  Remember, Grandma might say that the only good snake is a dead snake. Uncle Byron doesn't like to kill snakes.  He would remove the bad ones from close to the campers and release them on the far side of the island.