Three-year-old Kaid Fuhrman was out tooling around the yard in his battery-operated automobile the other day when he happened upon a snake. And not just any snake. It was a rattlesnake, or to the aficionado of such stuff, an Eastern Timber Rattlesnake. Three feet long and in a foul mood was the way it was described to me.
What makes the story charming (can a story about a venomous snake be charming?) is that little Kaid, who's still working on developing a broad vocabulary, jumped off his ride and came running into the house (my son lives up in Roanoke County) screaming, "Rattlesnake! There's a rattlesnake in the yard!"
My son, as it turns out, had warned Kaid and Kaid's twin sister about bad snakes, one of which - the biggest, baddest of which - is the rattlesnake and warned them to never go near them. Nobody's sure how Kaid was able to recognize the breed but, sure enough, when my son and daughter-in-law went out to inspect Kaid's find, there lay, at the side of their house, a chubby little rattlesnake.
After the initial shock wore off, my son retrieved a garbage can, scooped the surly monster inside, drove down the road, and released it into a creekbed.
Before you ask, "Why didn't he shoot the snake?" understand that that is not how we do things in modern America. We love all God's creatures; even those that choose to kill us and eat us.
Anyway, we're all proud of little Kaid. Most adults wouldn't be able to recognize a rattlesnake when they came upon one. But then most people don't live in Rattlesnake Central either.
