FOREST AND STREAM. 
[JAn. 6, 1906. 





Blacksnake Stories. 
On the platform of the little station of W., on 
one of the lines of railroad that traverse west- 
ern New York, there stood last summer an 
ordinary dry goods box. The front had been re- 
moved and a piece of wire screen nailed in its 
place. Within, on a flooring of gravel and 
sand, lived a large blacksnake, which was caught 
a short distance down the track by some of the 
railroad men. She was a beauty of the brunette 
type, to quote the story papers, with a small 
head and a_ glistening, black, scale-covered 
body, more than five feet long. Most of the 
time she lay coiled up and inert, but when 
aroused, she would glide with great rapidity 
around the narrow walls of her prison. Three 
or four days after she was captured, she laid 
twenty-three eggs of a dirty white color and 
oblong shape, covered with a thick skin or 
membrane. Under normal conditions, she would 
have buried them in a warm sandy spot where 
the heat of the sun would incubate them; but, 
disheartened, no doubt, by imprisonment, she 
left them in a heap in a corner and paid no 
more heed to them than to the pebbles that 
composed her bed. Occasionally she made a 
frugal meal of a toad or mouse, but would ac- 
cept no other proffers of good will. What she 
thought of the bustle and stir about her, of the 
whizzing trains and curious faces pressed close 
to her cage, no one knew. As far as she could, 
she ignored them all, even to the sticks that 
were sometimes thrust in to stir her up; only 
once did she turn upon a careless tormentor 
and leave the print of her fangs in his thumb, 
a wound which caused little more discomfort 
than the stab of a thorn of similar size. 
It was evident that she was not contented, 
for, one day, when by accident or design, the 
slide in the cage was left open (I think the girl 
operator who “has a tender heart for all living 
things knows how it happened) she dropped 
through the opening and was not seen again. 
The country around W. was formerly noted 
for its big blacksnakes. The rocks hereabouts 
are of soft, crumbly shale, full of holes and fis- 
sures, and there are many steep, wooded 
ravines which afforded good hiding places for 
the crawlers. They have nearly all disappeared 
now along with the game, but traditions still 
survive of snakes of prodigious size.- 
One day, I started an old resident on a train 
of reminiscence concerning blacksnakes by 
asking if he had ever seen one climb a tree. 
“Why, certain!” was his emphatic reply, 
“more than once. Down there in the hollow 
(it’s cut down now) used to stand a big syca- 
more—smooth bark, you know, and twenty 
feet to the limbs. I happened along one morn- 
ing just in time to see a blacksnake climb it. 
I watched him until he was pretty well up to 
the limbs then stoned him out and killed him.” 
“Did he hug the trunk and go up spirally?” 
asked one of his listeners. 
“Not a bit of it. He just crooked himself a 
little and went up the side as slick as grease. 
Them fellers are dreadful fond of young birds, 
and when you see one up a tree, ten to one he’s 
hunting that kind of spring chicken. But they 
are likely to pre-empt any kind of a hole that 
suits their fancy above ground or below. I once 
killed a pair that were sunning themselves on 
a branch of a hollow tree. From appearances, 
I should say that they _had been living in the 
hole for some time. One spring, a man and 
his wife that owned a summer cottage by the 
lake, came up early to make some repairs. They 
built a fire in the stove to warm up the place, 
and after working a spell, sat down to eat their 
lunch. About that time, a snake crawled out 
of a hole in the plastering and started to come 

and that spiled the lunch 
down on the table, 
party. Another time, Abe Wilson and me was 
cutting bean poles for the garden in a little 
gully on his place. Abe was pulling hard on a 
sapling that was tangled up in a wild grape 
vine, when down came a blacksnake plump on 
to his neck. There never was such a scart feller 
before nor sence. He gave one yell and lit 
out of there on the double quick. Guess the 
snake was some scart, too, but he didn’t have 
much time to think about it before I landed a 
big rock on his head.” 
“Do they ever attack a man?” some one 
queried. 
“Generally not, though I’ve seen a few that 
were real sassy. One morning in haying when 
I was a young feller, dad sent me down in the 
field to turn over some rakings that had got 
wet. It was hot and muggy, and I was settin’ 
on the top rail of the bars and wishing that 
there wa’n’t no such thing as rakings, when I 
heard a noise like the old woman’s tea kettle 
letting off steam. There right under me, 
stretched out on the bottom rail, was a snake. 
He’d seen me first and was spiling for a fight. 
I called the dog and we had some fun. He’d 
make a spring at Tige and then coil up quick 
as lightning in the fence corner, where he was 
protected. Tige was great for woodchucks, but 
he didn’t care to tackle the snake, and I had to 
kill him with a pitch-fork. 
“The biggest snake I ever killed was when I 
was a chunk of a boy going to school. ’Twas 
in June, and another feller of my age and three 
or four of the girls went into a brush lot below 
the school house for wintergreens. The girls 
were on ahead, and when they climbed the fence 
next to a little gully, they jumped down onto 
a snake. *Twas the greatest mixup you ever 
saw, for them girls fell all over each other and 
piled up in a heap getting away. Jim and me 
was bare-footed, but, of course, we went to the 
rescue and pulled the girls out and killed the 
snake. He was a black racer and lacked just 
a leetle of seven feet.” 
We had had some previous discussion about 
the power that a snake’s muscles must exert in 
holding and crushing his prey, and now I put 
the question to the old resident. 
“Well,” he said, slowly, “I don’t know much 
about that; but give a snake a hole and a good 
purchase and no two men can pull him out. Tl 
tell you how I know. I was once hauling grain 
out of a field along with my son, and as we 
came up to the barn with a load, we saw a 
snake run into the stones at the side of a little 
sluice. We stopped, and there was about a 
third of the snake’s body sticking out of the 
hole. Somehow he couldn’t get in further. 
We took hold of the tail and pulled till our 
arms cracked, but couldn’t budge him. We'd 
left the team standing with the load and so had 
to go on, but I wasn’t going to lose that snake. 
I took a stout piece of twine and tied the tail 
to a tree. When we came back, the snake was 
still there, but we couldn’t get him until I 
loosened the stones and poked him out with a 
stick. Then I tied him to the tail-end of the 
wagon and drove lickety-split down a big hill, 
thinking he’d be ground fine, scraping over the 
stones. Blamed if he didn’t straighten himself 
out stiff and ride through the air like a bird. 
I guess the muscles of that snake was doing 
some business ’long about that time. 
“There was an old woman, an herb doctor, 
used to come to dad’s long ago. She looked 
like a witch, and people went to her for charms 
and to have their dreams told. Lots o’ folks 
was superstitious in them days, same as now. 
She told me that if I would ketch a snake out 
of his hole after sundown and kill him and hold 
him to the fire just as he was dying, I would 
see his feet come out. I had the earache bad 
by spells, and one time she brought a little 
bottle half full of a dark-brown oil. She said 
it was out of a blacksnake, and told dad to 
drop a little of it into my ear when it ached. He 
tried it, and it eased the pain right away. Mebbe 
Aunt, Eunice wasn’t the best authority on snakes’ 
feet,” the old man concluded, and his eyes 
twinkled as he shouldered his hoe and slouched 
off to the garden, “but she was all right about 
the earache, for I’ve never had it sence.” 
ME 
The Basilisk Eye. 
HartTForpD, Conn.—The power of the human 
eye as a means whereby dangerous animals, 
wild or domestic, could be intimidated or even 
subdued, holds an honored place in tradition, 
and in a lesser degree, holds a conceded place 
in the beliefs of the present. Time and ex- 
perience have convinced me that the power of 
the human eye as a means of animal training 
belongs to the thousand and one myths which, 
by the vagaries of life, are accepted for a time 
as truths, become a matter of accepted knowl- 
edge, and then pass into the rubbish which fol- 
lows the acquirement of greater and more ac- 
curate knowledge, and in time forgotten. 
Through reading vast stores of literary trash, 
chiefly devoted to impossible adventure as ex- 
pounded by Beadle’s dime novel writers whose 
actual experiences undoubtedly were limited to 
hall bedrooms and quick lunch counters, I be- 
came a firm believer in the subjugating powers 
of the human eye. One needed but to look 
sharply, calmly and steadily into the very center 
of the eye of lion, tiger, bull, elephant or 
mad dog, and victory began at one for the man. 
The formula required that the animal thus 
transfixed, should relax, his eyes would slink 
and roll, his legs would involuntarily carry him 
backward a few steps, after which he would 
suddenly turn and scurry away over hill and 
dale, in inglorious panic, “with head erect and 
tail athwart the sky.” : 
Before exploiting any great dramatic lesson, 
which has its hope and hold in sentiment only, 
it is well to try it on the dog. While tarrying 
in the south some years ago, I had occasion to 
call at a large country mansion oa business. 
While walking in a stately tread from the front 
gate—quite a distance in that land of ample 
lawns—a big, black, cloddy brute of a dog came. 
leisurely galloping down the walk to meet me. 
His most salient features were threatening 
growls, barks, teeth and hostility. “Aha! I 
will transfix thee with mine eye!” I thought. I 
remained calm and comfortable. I took no 
thought of defense other than my trusty, eagle 
eye. Thus, saving the powers of the eye and the 
immunities conferred by it, I was quite broadly 
exposed to attack in a physical way. 
I caught the brute’s eye. It glowed with 
nearly all the prismatic colors, in a lovely play 
of angry light. He came on without a pause. 
“Thou wilt stop shortly and wilt flee,” thought I. 
Suddenly the brute lowered his eyes, so that I 
lost his gaze. He suddenly darted forward, 
grabbed a mouthful of my shin just below the 
knee, and gave a bite which filled my being with 
much anguish. Then he retired a few steps, 
calmly turned and looked me brazenly in the 

eye. His owner then appeared and called the 
dog off. I told him what his dog had done to 
me. He looked at the dog in a manner which 
implied solicitude concerning whether the dog 
had injured himself by over exertion. He then 
quietly remarked that Spartan was sometimes 
petulant with strangers. My faith in the powers 
of the human eye as a destroyer was shocked 
quite a bit. BASILISK. 
