Word: klauber
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Klauber tells how rattlesnakes hunt. Their eyes are pretty good, but in darkness they depend on the "pits" in the sides of their heads. These are true senses, responding to infra-red (heat) radiation like soldiers' snooperscopes. In the darkest night or at the bottom of the darkest burrow, the snake can "see" a mouse or a squirrel by the warmth of its skin...
...rattle is a simple warning, not a love call, and males take only the briefest interest in the females. But male rattlesnakes have the odd custom of "wrestling" together, swaying their heads and bodies with a graceful rhythmic motion. The defeated snake is never bitten or otherwise hurt. Klauber is not sure of the purpose of the wrestling match. He thinks it may have some connection with mating, but admits that the emotions of rattlesnakes are hard to analyze...
Popular remedies for rattlesnake bite are as numerous as the diseases that venom was once supposed to cure. Klauber lists onions, garlic, chewed tobacco, ammonia, kerosene, gunpowder, nitric acid, lye, quicklime, and freshly killed chickens, split and applied to the wound. All such nostrums are useless, as is the classic remedy, whisky, which Klauber thinks has killed many snakebite victims who would have recovered if left untreated. The only effective drug is antivenin, which must be used with care. Best first-aid treatment is a ligature or tourniquet to isolate the bitten part of the body. The wound should...
Only about 1,000 Americans a year are bitten by rattlesnakes, and of these only 30 die. But this record, says Klauber, should not encourage amateurs to get familiar with rattlesnakes. Even men who handle them professionally, he says, are often bitten. An apparently dead rattlesnake should never be touched carelessly; it may revive and strike. Even a severed head can bite for half an hour...
Rattlesnakes do not make good pets, Klauber warns solemnly. When caressed with the hand or stroked with a brush, they sometimes arch their backs, but this apparent appreciation should not be depended upon. Klauber tells of a woman, Mrs. Grace O. Wiley, who petted her snakes and enjoyed seeing them arch their backs like cats. "Her fearless handling of venomous snakes," he says, "was well known, yet . . . even in her case, after many years of experience, there was a fatal termination...