Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/373

Rh he will look as threatening and deadly as any animal could, but, unless he be shedding, he will seldom strike if he can avoid it by escaping from his tormentors.

Although he had been handling and collecting snakes for thirty years, my guide had, until this trip, never been bitten by a rattler. One morning he had caught, in a noose at the end of a pole, a large rattler that was shedding and was, therefore, very vicious. Where a snake was lying in an inaccessible place, or was, as in this case, unusually

vicious, a noose was generally used and the snake thus transferred to a bag carried for the purpose. As he was being lowered into the bag, this particular snake gave a sudden twist and one of his poison fangs cut a long gash in the hand of his captor. Fortunately for the man, only the extreme tip of the fang penetrated the skin, so that little or no poison was injected. The guide always carried a hypodermic syringe for just such emergencies, so that a dose of potasiumpotassium [sic] permanganate was soon injected into the wound, and no ill effects from the bite were felt.

Although the bite of these rattlers is not necessarily fatal to man, almost any one in that region can tell of one or more cases where death has followed within a few hours of the time that the wound was inflicted.