Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 25, No. 3, March 26, 1980

Death Rattle by Stephen Wasylyk

The mountains had a way of exacting a price for ignorance and carelessness, just as the city did...

At dawn, Drake was up and driving, dressed in heavy boots and lightweight slacks and jacket, leaving the motel and heading toward the creek beside which Gruber camped on his annual fishing trip.

He crossed a low stone bridge and followed the road as it rose toward the crest of the prehistoric wrinkle of land that formed the side of a small valley. At the top he maneuvered the car off the road and deep into the woods, unlocked the trunk, and pulled the rifle from under the lip of the rear deck where it was held by heavy magnets sewn into the case and where it was out of sight when the trunk was opened. The rifle had started out as a standard 30.06 but Drake had replaced the stock with one custom-made for himself, incorporating more drop than usual and specially worked hand grips. Dropping three shells into his jacket pocket, he started through the trees along a narrow hiking trail.

He hadn’t gone twenty feet when he stopped, startled by the dry rattle.

Coiled in the grey dappled morning shadows, a large timber rattler contested his passage, its coloring blending with the dust and dead leaves.

Drake’s mouth twisted. A tall man with long blond hair and a square, bony face, he had few extreme dislikes and feared little, but rattlesnakes fell into both categories. Looking at the coiled snake brought to mind the feel of the dry scales and the powerful muscles beneath. His palms grew wet. Still sluggish from the cool night, the snake regarded Drake with malevolent eyes, its tongue flickering.

“Seems like they come in cycles and the woods are full of them this summer,” the kid in the motel had said. “You gotta be careful.”

Drake stepped back and set the rifle aside. He searched until he found a flat heavy rock and, from high over his head, smashed it down on the coiled rattler, driving the triangular head deep into the dust with a feeling of satisfaction.

The body writhed for long minutes before it was still.

Drake picked up the rifle and continued, his cold eyes searching the ground before him.

The trees grew thin, then opened to a wild meadow that was the result of a long-ago fire from which only a few trees had recovered. Below, to his left, curls of mist rose from a small creek. Drake left the ridge, angling downward, working his way around patches of dense brush.

He pushed his way down the hillside until the little valley opened before him and Gruber’s camper and tent were in sight. There was no movement there. Drake looked for a place of concealment, not only from the creek but from anyone hiking along the crest of the hill. The woods were awake now, birds singing and unseen small animals making rustling sounds in the brush.

Its needles long since dried and brown, showering down when he touched them, a tall pine had become victim to a storm and its roots had pulled up the earth as it fell, leaving a cavity now almost completely covered with weeds and coarse grass.

The natural foxhole was ideal for the short time he’d need one.

Remembering the rattler, Drake used the barrel of the rifle to probe the grass thoroughly. Satisfied, he avoided a large patch of nettles, lowered himself to his stomach, and thrust the rifle through the tall weeds toward the campsite along the creek. Above and to his left, the dead roots of the tree loomed high, while in back of him trees and scrub brush concealed him from the ridge. Settled down into the pit, he couldn’t be seen by anyone not standing almost on the rim of the hole.

He peered through the scope of the rifle, making delicate adjustments until he could see the campsite clearly and sharply. There was still no movement. Gruber’s camper and the small tent beside the stream could have been an idyllic setting for a photo extolling the benefits of the great outdoors.

He checked the rifle again and began to take deep breaths. When the time came to shoot, he couldn’t afford to be anything but relaxed. With the trial next week, Shelbrook wouldn’t like it if he failed.

He glanced at his watch. Gruber was a little late arising this morning.

Lying motionless in the heat of the rising sun, insects buzzing around him, Drake was suddenly aware that his mouth was dry. He grimaced. He should have brought a canteen. And insect repellent. He was getting careless — but, then, he hadn’t expected Gruber to oversleep.

He was lying perfectly still, his left hand cradling the rifle, his right curled casually around the stock, when he felt movement along his left leg.

He stopped breathing. His mind told him it could be any kind of small animal. His senses told him it was not. A heavy rope seemed to be rippling across his legs.

Holding his body rigid, Drake had to bite his tongue to keep from screaming.

Down on the creek bank, a grey-haired man with a heavy belly, wearing an undershirt, slid out from under the small tent and headed toward the creek.

Drake closed his eyes and willed himself not to move. He could imagine he felt the broad belly plates digging as the reptile crossed his legs.

The movement stopped but he could still feel the weight alongside his right calf.

The man below returned and pulled a small propane stove from the rear of the camper.

Drake’s eyes were still glued to the scope. He had only to move the crosshairs a trifle and squeeze the trigger, but he knew the sudden jar and noise would startle the snake and bring on a strike.

He cursed silently. The sun beat down. An ant crawled across his hand. Birds sang in the woods, darted and swooped overhead. His thirst mounted. Most of his weight was on his left side, and his ribs and muscles began to ache. Drake resisted the desire to leap to his feet and run. There was no way he could move quickly enough. The uprooted tree to his left prevented him from rolling away from the snake, and he couldn’t move his legs to spring ahead or back.

The sun climbed higher.

The man beside the creek was working at the stove, preparing breakfast. Foreign to the forest, the odor of coffee drifted up the hillside.

Drake fought down an impulse to turn his head, to look at what was beside his leg. He knew that if he saw that triangular head so close nothing could keep him from leaping to his feet.

The snake moved. Drake felt it curling on itself.

Hearing a slithering whisper, he shifted his eyes. Some feet in front the tall weeds wavered as something moved toward him, something hidden in the grass, and suddenly it appeared only a few feet in front of him and coming right at him.

It was the largest rattler he’d ever seen. Evidently headed for the hole Drake was in, the snake paused as it caught his body heat, its tongue flicking rapidly.

It was so close the deep pits under the eyes stood out with startling clarity, so close he could count the scales, so close the shadow of the rifle barrel fell across it.

Drake understood then. Somewhere under that tangled mass of roots was a den and, without thinking, he had moved into the rattlers’ front yard. Examining the depression hadn’t meant a damn thing. He should have known better, picked a more open spot. He should have remembered from his youth how things were in the mountains, how wild things behaved.

The flat eyes stared into his. Blood running cold, ice forming painfully deep inside his gut, he wanted to let go of the rifle, throw himself backward, and run.

He now had one snake coiled against his leg and another staring him in the face. Boxed in, he thought, as if it had been planned.

His stomach tightened, his nerves beginning a thin screaming that seemed to be nowhere yet everywhere inside.

Below, Gruber had donned a bright red shirt and was busy eating breakfast.

Neither snake moved as the sun rose higher.

Drake squeezed his eyes tightly shut. He couldn’t escape with his body so he escaped with his mind, down the long dark tunnel of memory. He relived his days as a shoeless boy in the mountains, long before he grew up and met Shelbrook; the days when all he hunted were the deer, the bear, and the small running game of the forest. He had learned to shoot well because shells were expensive and each shot counted. If he missed he often went hungry.

And he had been smart enough in those days to know how to live in these mountains but the years had cost him that wisdom, and the mountains had a way of exacting a price for ignorance and carelessness just as the city did.

And then had come the war, and the targets became men. And after the war there was Shelbrook, with money to pay for that skill with the rifle, because Shelbrook knew there were always men who desired the death of other men and were willing to pay for it. And none of it made any difference to Drake because he told himself that each day, each hour, each minute, somewhere in the world men justified killing other men in the name of religion or politics or hate or greed — and if he did it for money he was no better or worse than any of them.

He had only contempt for someone like Gruber who would testify next week because he felt he had to testify, who would gain nothing for himself in taking the witness stand and, even though he had to be aware that he couldn’t be allowed to tell his story, was still fool enough to come up here to fish when he should have been in a guarded room somewhere.

The fierce ache in Drake’s cramped muscles brought him back to where he was.

The rattler had coiled upon itself defensively and its head was slowly weaving, its forked tongue darting, its tail buzzing sporadically. It was puzzled by this warm-blooded, unmoving thing before it, uncertain as to whether it represented danger.

Flying insects, attracted by the film of perspiration that covered Drake’s body, crawled over him, bit freely through his thin slacks and returned to bite again. Unable to move, to scratch, Drake felt his skin was afire. His face and hands were smarting from the sun and his left arm had become numb.

The heat, the thirst, the insect bites, and the fear piled up and for a moment he felt himself sagging into a pit of horror from which he could emerge only as a madman. He closed his eyes and clamped his jaws shut so tightly his teeth hurt.

Below, Gruber was washing his breakfast dishes in the creek.

Drake calculated the odds. The snake alongside him would not move. Nestled against his warm leg, it had no reason to move. What the rattler in front of him would do was questionable. It represented the bigger threat because any bite would be in Drake’s face, arms, or upper torso and thus more deadly.

The feeling grew that he would have to move.

The longer he lay here the more numb his body would become, so that when he did call on his muscles he would be slow to react. He might have waited too long already.

If he could get rid of the rattler in front of him first and take his chances on the one alongside his leg—

Drake held his breath, knowing that if the snake chose to strike it would be too fast for the eye to follow, with no way to dodge or avoid it.

His cramped muscles screaming in protest, he suddenly snapped the rifle barrel to his left, batting away the rattler before it could move while he hurled himself backward, thrusting the butt of the rifle hard toward where he felt the snake along his leg would be.

He felt nothing as the butt of the rifle thrust the snake away and he rolled and smashed down at the head frantically, one blow flattening it against the dry earth.

Dragging the rifle, he scrambled out of the pit for a few yards and knelt, shuddering, his chest heaving, gulping great draughts of air through his open mouth.

The snake he had batted away had disappeared. The one he had killed still writhed slowly.

Kneeling at the edge of the pit, clutching his rifle for support, Drake felt a weakness wash over him as the tension within him faded.

Below, Gruber was packing away his propane stove.

Still time, thought Drake.

He took a deep breath and lifted the rifle, the crosshairs centered on Gruber’s chest. Even after his experience with the snakes, they held steady.

His finger took up the slack of the trigger.

It might have been nothing more than the harsh clarity of the morning light, but through the scope Gruber emerged as not just a target but a man, a weary-looking middle-aged man with a coarse face and a protuberant stomach who meant nothing to Drake, and it seemed to Drake that killing him would be a waste of time and ammunition. It would accomplish nothing, and the world would go on as it always had.

He lowered the rifle. To hell with Shelbrook, he thought. Let him get someone else.

Gruber picked up a fishing rod and disappeared downstream.

Drake watched him go almost with relief, aware suddenly of a burning and stinging in the calf of his right leg and the tension and fear came back, accompanied now by a despair and a sickness in the pit of his stomach. Since he had felt nothing immediately, he had assumed he had been faster than the snake.

He raised his pant leg carefully.

The side of his calf was a reddish patch of fine scratches and his eye fell on the smashed and crushed center of the greyish green cluster of nettles before him. He had rolled right through them.

Nettles, he thought. He felt a desire to throw his head back and laugh, to let his relief echo from the walls of the little valley. He shook his head. Nettles.

He started back toward his car, walking quickly.

His leg began to throb. He stopped several times and rubbed it gently. By the time he reached the car his leg felt so heavy he could hardly move it, and as he stowed the rifle in the trunk a sudden weakness made him clutch the car for support.

Tenderly he rubbed his leg. Damned nettles, he thought. Must have some kind of poison to them.

He drove, headed back for the motel, light-headed now, a nausea riding in his stomach as he followed the road down toward the creek. The car wove erratically. Several times he brought it back to the road with great effort.

When the road reached the foot of the hillside, it turned almost at a right angle across the low stone bridge. Drake didn’t make it. The car continued straight, plunging through the underbrush and teetering for a moment on the edge of the bank before plunging into the shallow water.

Several hundred yards away, Gruber heard the crash, dropped his fishing rod, and ran toward the sound. When he reached the wreck, Drake had pulled himself clear and was lying on the steep bank, his clothing soaked and one pant leg riding high. He was pale, his breathing quick and shallow, and as Gruber ran toward him the first thing he noticed was Drake’s bare leg. He stared. He was no doctor but he didn’t have to be. He had been an outdoorsman all his life and he recognized what he saw.

No longer concealed by the multitudinous nettle scratches on Drake’s leg, the marks of twin fangs were centered in a purple swelling.

Gruber swore and fumbled for the snake-bite kit he had learned to carry long ago, his fingers trembling as he injected the antivenin, sliced open the fang marks, and applied the suction cup.

To do what he could was something he owed any man, but as he worked he couldn’t escape the feeling that he somehow owed this one something more.