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The Cold Blooded NewsThe Newsletter of the Colorado Herpetological SocietyVolume 28, Number 4; April, 2001 |
After the meeting one of them came up and told me a hoop snake story:
She was at home, and she kept hearing her husband's voice call out to her from a considerable distance, "Open the door! Open the door!" He sounded desperate so she whipped the back door open to see her husband running full speed toward the house, and in close pursuit of him was a large hoop snake, rolling like a wheel with its tail in its mouth.
The husband did win the race. He flung himself inside and slammed the door and the snake went under the house and was not seen again.
I have heard dozens of hoop snake stories over the past 40 years, and that's almost always the way they end, with the snake running under the house. Not really a thing of the past. However, this one at Lake Jackson was unique because I had never before been told a hoop snake story by an attractive woman at a country club luncheon. Usually I hear such stories in ice houses and country post offices and at beer busts and stag barbecues.
In fact, hearing the story at the country club sort of pushed me off track, and I let that woman get away without even thanking her. I didn't get her name, either, or find out exactly where that house is that the serpent ran under, and when that foot race took place. It sounded recent, and that's unusual because most hoop snake stories happened a long time ago.
If you're a new customer here, maybe you don't know about hoop snakes. I've collected a wagon load of stories about these remarkable reptiles. Herpetologists who know snakes and write scientific books and journals about them say there's no such thing as hoop snakes that do what the stories say they do. Yet I hear people who seem perfectly intelligent saying they've seen hoop snakes rolling across the pasture with their tails in their mouths.
The stories say this snake is far more venomous than any diamondback rattler. It has a stinger on its tail and anything that stinger touches can be sent straight to the undertaker's. Hoop snake can kill a 200-pound man, or a 2,000-pound bull. Hoop snake can sting a giant tree and kill it. I've been shown 100-foot cottonwoods in East Texas, dead from hoop snake stings. I've had letters from hunters who've shot hoop snakes and seen the stingers on their tails.
No, I've never met a hoop snake, but I've been chased by them, two or three times, back when I was just a shirttail kid and believed anything I heard. Safer to run and believe. We'd be out in the woods and my cousin C.T. would yell, "Look out! Here comes a hoop snake!" And I'd run all the way to the barn without looking back. I wasn't about to lose ground by turning around to see what might be chasing me.
I've talked to snake experts and read the stuff they write and there is, in fact, a reptile called a hoop snake. It's also called a mud snake, and a stinging snake. Scientific name is Farancia abacura.
This fellow, according to snake experts, is entirely harmless. In his book, Reptiles of North America, published by Doubleday, Richard Ditmars says the snake often called a hoop or a stinging snake does have a sharp scale at the end of its tail. And when you handle this serpent it tries to poke you with that scale. But it doesn't really sting.
Ditmars also says this snake sometimes lies in the grass in a sort of circle, suggesting a bicycle tire. So maybe that's the source of the popular notion that a hoop snake rolls with its tail in its mouth. The book says it doesn't do any such thing.
I wish I'd had this book back about 1931 when I was running barefooted through rocks and cat claw bushes and prickly pear, to keep those hoop snakes from catching me.
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