Geb was the best snake hunter I’ve ever known. Like most people who are really good at something, his skill was a combination of natural talent and hard work. His home range was South Florida, but on a trip to Tennessee he spotted a 2 ft copperhead, going up a clay bank, from 50 ft away, from a moving car. The fact that the snake was dead (traveled that far, and no further, after being run over) probably made it harder to see as it wasn’t moving. The guy was great!
We met at FSU where, because I had a few extra years in that theater, I showed him the same-ole-places – and we discovered a few new ones: Tram Road, County 67 and some places we never found again because (this being before GPS) we didn’t know exactly where we were.
His mother was of the “at least he’s not out stealing hubcaps” school of child rearing and his Dad was a sportsman (sawed off). To wit, once his Dad was not being careful enough and shot a hole in the parental bed with a Colt .44. Reportedly, his great fear was what Fran would say. In the event, Fran thought she had burned a hole in the spread with a cigarette and worried what Larry would say. My kind of folks.
The family, nature appreciators all, had a cabin just north of Alligator Alley about two-thirds of the way to Naples; basically Snake City. Being from Ft. Lauderdale, and an ace snake hunter, Geb had around 30 indigo snakes to his credit when we went for a weekend into this paradise.
Most people have never heard of an indigo snake though, to those in the know, it is the King, the Prince, the Emperor, Numero Uno of North American snakes: big, in fact the longest US snake at 8ft, 6.25in (then and now), heavy bodied, though not a constrictor, shiny deep blue, stem to stern (save for the red throat) and an eater of most other vertebrates. Old snake books held that the Seminoles tried to scare their children from wandering off for fear that “cekto”* (Creek) or “cinto”* (Miccosukee) was out there. A possibly useful, but essentially empty, warning as the indigo snake is fortunately mild mannered.
We arrived Friday afternoon with enough time to look around and on an expansive pile of old lumber (likely a prior cabin), found a long shed skin. The next morning, in no particular hurry, we ate and went to see if the customer who left the skin was available. And available he was, sitting right in the middle of the lumber shining in the morning sun as only a newly shed indigo snake can shine. I started my best “Niagara Falls” approach but Bailey yelled “RUN!!”. So I ran and picked up my first (and only) wild indigo snake.
We took the prize back to show Geb’s mother. The odd thing was nobody did a double take on its size until we were holding it up in the living room and it went from ceiling to floor. Bailey says “How the #@&% big is this thing?” As Roger Conant noted, repeated measures tend to produce slightly different results. I recall, at the time, 8ft 3in as the number. The snake never measured less than 7ft 11in. There is a fair chance that the snake was in the top ten ever caught in the U.S., size wise (maybe top five).
He went to live with me for a while but, although he would eat almost anything (rats, mice, catfish), he kept changing his mind and started heading into the ‘failure to thrive’ zone. So I sent him back to his wood pile. Over the years, I’ve become convinced that there are snakes that simply need the sun itself to do well. Black snakes, indigo snakes, coach whips – the ones you never see out at night (but do see running around in the heat of the day). So he went back to the heat of the day and maybe he tacked on a few more inches to really become the biggest one.
*A tip-of-the-hat to Culture Department at the Billy Osceola Memorial Library and JLE (aka SEMINOLE74) for coming up with the Seminole word. While there were slightly different thoughts on the correct spelling everyone agreed that there was not a particular Seminole word for the indigo snake, only one word that covered all snakes. This leads me to predict that if one were to stand before a native Seminole speaker, shade one’s eyes from the sun, look around from side to side as if scanning the ground and say “chetto” the translation of the reply would be “you can have my share”.
ML
5/1/08
