In April, the greenery sprouts, and the animals and insects that have stung for a winter begin to come alive again. So I thought of the snake.
"The Farmer and the Snake" is most likely a story made up by the ancients. Although I am not a farmer, I know that snakes hibernate, and I have never heard of snakes freezing on the ground. With snakes, of course, the non-venomous snakes of the north, there have been many intersections.
Speaking of snakes, I have to talk about my childhood. Because, at that time, I was a farmer. Schooling is not very important, and cutting sheep grass in the field is a daily lesson. Because of this experience, the crops in the northern plains are omniscient, and most of the wild grasses, although they are not called school names, have different feelings.
Snakes are an alternative in a mowing career.
Seeing a very lush weed, waving its scythe like a fly, suddenly a snake would emerge from the grass and watch it grow away without anyone. At this time, people tend to be shocked, scream and run away. Snakes like shade and water, so where grass grows vigorously, it is often also the home of snakes.
Common local snakes are commonly known as cauliflower snakes or grass snakes, the scientific name may be the king snake, oval head, yellow-green throughout, sometimes with some red spots, the abdomen is white node-like, non-venomous, adult snake about half a meter long. Although people know that this snake is not poisonous, at first glance, they will still panic, which shows that the human genetic gene has formed a psychological reflex of fear of snakes. As people say: snakes have crazy hair. There is also a local common saying of the seven-inch snake, but it has never been seen. Legend has it that the python in the local mountain has been seen, but it was experienced in the zoo later. It has nothing to do with the mountains, and it has nothing to do with the locality.
Once, idle in the wheat field, intending to find one or two lark chicks to raise home. After half a day of touching, I didn't find a lark nest, but I found a few lark eggs. Overjoyed, I wanted to take the eggs home and eat them. After thinking about it, I felt that if the eggshell had been hatched, it would be abandoned, so I gently broke one. Unexpectedly, this egg was not a bird egg, and in the broken shell, seven or eight small snakes of no length poured out in silence, crawling along the cracks in the soil. I couldn't help but feel a tingling in my scalp and let out a cold sweat. However, it is known from now on that the snake was also oviparous.
I have witnessed the process of snakes swallowing frogs: the canal is filled with water left over from spring watering, although it is not much, but it still nurtures many aquatic creatures. There are fish, and there are a lot of frogs and dragonflies. In the hot summer, dragonflies fly around the water, and frogs sing on the shore. I lay half in the shade of the trees on the shore, half-closed, and cooled off. Suddenly I felt that something was wrong, and it turned out that the frog drum, which had just been very loud, had become a long rest. When I opened my eyes, I saw a small frog struggling to jump into the water of the canal. Unexpectedly, it was supposed to jump forward, but in the instant it jumped up, it was sucked back by some force and landed in the original place, even further back. In confusion, I looked closely, but I saw that behind the frog, there was a vegetable snake raising its head, opening its mouth wide, and constantly spitting out blood-red letters. I held my breath, and it sucked silently, and saw the frog jump into its mouth in a desperate struggle. After the snake swallowed the frog, from the neck to the abdomen, a lump the size of an egg slowly moved backwards through the slender body. After a long time, the snake began to move, and quietly crawled into the grass in front of it.
Perhaps because of adolescence, we seem to grow up suddenly one day. The most obvious sign is that a group of boys start playing with snakes. While frolicking in the weeds, a snake is suddenly found, not scrambling to escape, but competing for who is braver. First, the bold child rushed up with an arrow and took the scythe directly to the snake's seven inches, causing the snake to sway from side to side, but could not move forward for half a step, until everyone was killed alive with earth and stone bricks. Later, when he didn't bother to use any auxiliary objects, he saw the snake, and rushed straight forward, grabbed his tail, shook it wildly (legend has it that he could shake the skeleton of the snake), shook the snake to pieces, and even spit out all the undigested food in his abdomen, such as insects and voles, and collapsed into a mess; or, with one hand, he grabbed the tail of the snake and used a sickle in the other hand to cut the snake from the beginning like a noodle. Looking back now, it was cruel then. What's even more cruel is that sometimes when you grill food in the field and eat it, you will throw the caught snake into the fire and watch it twist and deform until the bright and dangling oil on its body comes out...
It is really strange that in those one or two years, the more we are not afraid of snakes, the more we can encounter snakes, often bringing a little stimulation to our poor and boring lives, and becoming the main goal of our practice of courage and bravery. I don't know how many innocent cauliflower snakes these wild children have harmed.
After a lot of experience, I felt that I was no longer afraid of snakes at all, but once the experience completely changed my cognition.
That time, I was mowing grass in a field where I had harvested my crops. The crops didn't seem to grow very well, but the weeds grew very pleasantly. I took three or five steps forward, and I laid out the cut grass in a pile, planning to tie it together when I got home. When the number was almost the same, and the rest was over, I got up and began to fold my arms in small piles. When receiving one of them, both hands suddenly felt touching a fleshy, cold thing, and they were shocked, threw away the grass and ran all the way back. After taking a few steps, I remembered that it might be a snake? What's so scary? When I looked back, I saw that the snake was wandering away from the side of the haystack. At that time, the psychological fear had not disappeared, the legs were still trembling, and there was no longer the courage to play with the snake, and I watched it run without a trace. You say, this psychological contrast to snakes is strange isn't it?
Leaving the countryside, it seems, leaving the land, and it is rare to see snakes. However, sometimes I go out fishing, but I still have some chance encounters with it. It will be for some reason, from nowhere, with its head held high, and its body will swagger through the water like a line, and it will look harmless to humans and animals for a while. Once, a snake swam straight up to me from the surface of the water, and it happened that day that I was carrying a thin-eyed fish protection, so I stopped the fishing rod, followed the direction it came from, opened the fish guard, and watched it swim leisurely into the protection. A snake entered the territory of the fish, and after a boiling, it was quiet and quiet. I thought it was funny, so I recorded a video and sent it to my friends, and everyone was amazed. After that, the snakes and fish are released together. It seems that as people grow older, their mentality becomes peaceful and it is easier to coexist peacefully with nature.