Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 January 1895 — THE SNAKE THAT GRINS. [ARTICLE]

THE SNAKE THAT GRINS.

This Is the Name by th* Indians to the Sidewinder. Chicago Tribune. To the unprejudiced observer th< sidewinder is by no means a badlooking snake. Indeed. the general '. expression of its face is bright and comical, rather than horrifying. When startled it has a habit of raising its head several times in the ail and then turning from side to side to see what is going on, At sucli timesthe quick motion“of thehead, together with the appearance of the horns, that stand up like shabby little ears, remind one almost irresistibly of a terrier when' some one says “Ratsl” Then, with Its mouthshut, the line of the lips seen from the side is a curve that rises at both ly the appearance of a sardonie grin as any snake’s face can assume. Ed Hadley, the best-known driver ol the big desert teams, first called the writers’ attention to this peculiarity, and said that the Paniment Indians living on the west side of Death Vab. ’ley have a name for the reptile that means “the snake with a grin.” In color, as a whole, the sidewinder is exactly like that of the mesa sand. When it is lying still no one walking along the desert, save an Indian, can see it. Once the eye has located it, however, it is found to be of a light yellowish color on the sides, with a stripe along the back, while very beautiful—brown spots, suggestive of the speckled trout, are scattered about on each side of the stripe. Farther toward the tail there are short tigerish stripes at right angles to the dorsal stripe, and there is a brown dash_just behind each eye. It has only one nostril, in the center of a large scale plate. Although it has but a single nostril the desert men believe that it has a very keen smell for a desert snake, and a part of their dread of the beast is due to tiffsY They say the snake is attracted by the smell of cooking food, and comes to their campfires to get something to eat. When near a bed it shows its liking for a warm, -bed that all snakes have, only in a greater degree, and no matter how hot the night may" be it will crawl on the bed of the sleeping desert man and stretch its cOolish length against his body. There is no snake in the desert that shows the liking for a blanket bed that the side* winder does, and so it is hated ac* cordingly. Not one of the desert men here can tell of a case by name and date where a sleeping man has been bitten by one of these snakes,

though every desert man will say offhand that “lots of such eases hap pen every year,”...