Just One Snake

Trail Wood #100 Earl Plato
Okay I love nature but I have another side to my character. I like local history too. I had published by Van Well Publishing Company my first of three historical fiction novels. It is entitled, Terror at Snake Hill. The setting is 1866 the Fenian Invasion of Upper Canada and the Battle of Ridgeway. The word “terror” in the novel had more than one reason for the word. In the climax chapter of the novel the heroine is trapped in the old redoubt at historic Fort Erie. She and her young friend enter the old stone fortification. He two bar the door. She turns to face a wall writhing with snakes hence the use of the word “terror.”. As a teenager on bike we visited an old quarry pi one Saturday in spring. There on one wall of the pit were, hundreds of garter snakes. It was mating time. snakes were writhing on the various ledges. It was a sight I never forgot. Years later I used that serpent scenario in my little novel.
Not so many snakes at Teale’s Summerhouse Rock as I saw but here is his concluding report:
“ Why have they selected our Trail Wood pond for their rendezvous? How have they arrived at this one? My guess is that they have followed scent trails left behind by the female. For a good part of the day this mating tangle of sinuous bodies remains on the rock. During long periods all the water snakes are still. Then a general wriggling and changing of positions sets in. By evening the May encounter is at an end. The aquatic snakes begin to scatter. In the next dawn we will see only one, the resident that makes its home along Azalea Shore. I wonder where the others will go. How far did they came for this tangled assemblage? Beside the pond the female will give birth to the living young that will number anywhere between sixteen and forty-four. Life for these creatures is precarious and usually short.”